The Age of Illusion

WSJ: How a Physicist Became a Climate Truth Teller

“I’ve been building models and watching others build models for 45 years,” he says. Climate models “are not to the standard you would trust your life to or even your trillions of dollars to.” Younger scientists in particular lose sight of the difference between reality and simulation: “They have grown up with the models. They don’t have the kind of mathematical or physical intuition you get when you have to do things by pencil and paper.”

Many people will read this as an article about climate change, but I think it gets to a much deeper problem in society: people cannot discern fact from fiction, reality from narrative, truth from lies. I grew up with the Internet so I can't say if anything has changed with respect to older people. Maybe they were always this gullible about everything. Many people didn't know the truth, but for the most part I'd chalk that up to being uninformed. Today, many people are still uninformed, but it turns out most information is spread by peer groups on the Internet. It's not that people will believe what the official sources tell them, it's that they'll believe whatever their peers think. One group believes regime sources, be it government or mainstream media. Another group thinks everything from those sources is fake. Some people investigate further, but most people do not.

The most delusional about reality are the more educated, aka credentialed. They "trust the science" even when the science is observably wrong or strongly refuted by well-sourced skeptics or challenged by credible theories. Evolution, dark matter, string theory, and now coronavirus/vaccines, the official story has holes punched in it, but to question the truth is to question what in their minds is reality. Police shootings, system racism, whihte privilege, the list goes on. Is it not surprising that people who get emotional about scientific theories such as evolution would also have trouble when it comes to crime statistics?

The ruling class lost their minds over Trump for a few reasons, but two of his biggest sins were centerd on the regime's concept of truth. First, most of what people perceive as real in politics is fake. Russiagate was fake from the start, only fools or ignorant (in the most neutral sense of not knowing) people believed it. Anyone who was awake during the Cold War knows how absurd it sounded from the get go, particularly when there was also a Presidential candidate in 2016, Bernie Sanders, who had literal ties to Soviet Russia. Two, people will believe anything. The panic over "conspiracy theories" and Trump's "lies" (mostly exaggerations) wasn't because the ruling class and media care about the truth. Rather, lies beat lies. If we let the old "World Weekly News" take over NBC and run Batboy stories at 6pm, half the country would believe in Batboy.

It goes deeper though. Older investors sohuld have noticed by now how younger investors have a total detachment from reality. The exclamation point on this for me was the GameStop (GME) short squeeze. I saw there were $1000 price targets and considered them crazy, but not impossible. A short-squeeze takes on a life of its own in the final phase. After investigating a little, however, I found there were investors who thought $1000 was a sustainable target, as in GME could go that high and stay there. Circling back into cryptocurrency, one starts to see an unhinged herd that is rolling through the markets driving prices without any concept for underlying value. This always happens during speculative periods, but my sense is younger investors have no concept of fundamental value. Back during the dotcom era there were absurd forecasts used as justifications for current valuations. Today, there are no justifications. If an investment has a cool meme, the price has no ceiling.

This gets back to more fundamental questions about the ruling class and core concepts such as science. One comparison I've made since 2008 is that climate models are similar to Wall Street's housing models that predicted home prices wouldn't decline nationwide. Neither was based on reality. Climate models are a shadow of the actual climate. Many models cannot hope to be accurate because they lack inputs. Last month, I posted an article by someone who is not a climate skeptic, but is someone who thinks warming isn't being driven by CO2. The Earth itself is a likely source of warming oceans, which explains why the oceans are warming faster than the rest of the climate. Last month, I also posted a study that eliminates dark matter.

In a prior age, busting holes in old theories would be celebrated. Science was celebrated precisely because it was constantly falsifying things as untrue. Today however, people become unnerved by learning. Scientists behave like authioritarian political commisars who attack honest skepticism and dissident theories. The truth creates a crisis. In politics and now science, independent voices that challenge or make their own truth claims incite panic. Censorship intensifies. Why? My hunch is because people have abandoned religion. As Chesterton put it: "When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything." For myself, I've become an advocate for having the Bible taught as an educational standard. Not necessarily because I believe it is true, though I do, but because if people are going to believe in something, might as well make it something with a provable track record of success. More importantly, and here's where I'll slip in a theological argument, is that the Bible teaches that there is objective Truth. Christian societies like the ones that existed before this modern world made incredible advancements in science. What's more, Jesus Christ claimed to be the Truth. A weak argument would be that believing in any objective truth, real or not, creates a soceity that believes in truth. The strong argument is that if Christ was lying, Christian societies would be untruthful. That they were not is a strong argument in favor of the divinity of Christ. Finally, while less educated Christians can be fooled by lies, in my experience, they are among the least likely to believe lies. If they do believe lies, they tend to be less serious ones like foolish conspiracy theories that don't impact daily life. For example, Creationists who believe God made the world literally six days, at least come up with scientifically-based theories when then scientific record disagrees with their theory. They can still be biologists and physicists, despite being literalist Creationists. Climate change believers have as much faith in climate models as Creationists have in a literal interpretation of the Bible, but the Creationists deal better with the holes in their theories because they can retreat to Faith. A hole in their theory doesn't dent their Faith. Climate model believers and others who worship science have no fallback. Holes in scientific theories shake their faith and destroy the core of their belief system. Pushing further, many people treat science as a religion. And even as a religion, it has become a superstition, an inferior religion as compared to the world's major ones. Most people cannot live under a philosophy of science that is constantly disproving reality. Religion provides a sound footing. Those who worship science instead develop faith in unproven theories such as evolution. They listen to scientists on topics such as coronavirus in the same exact way religious observers listen to priests on questions of theology.

In conclusion, I believe we may already be in a "new" Dark Ages. New in quotes because the Dark Ages has been debunked. Most of the West lives in an illusion because it cannot discern truth from fiction. Ideas such as systemic racism are provably false. If you dig into data and have an ojective concept of justice, you can make the case that whites and Asians are the most oppressed people in the United States. Yet society is falling apart because no one can refute this lie. The markets are unhinged because value is dead. Value investors have no currency in a world where people cannot estimate the value of company. The West was crippled by the coronavirus and spread lies about the virus itself, despite the fact that almost everything known about it in January is still true. The only thing is, you'd have to read Chinese news sources to get the truth, or stick with anonymous Twitter accounts that retweet dissident science from banned sources.

The most important thing to teach a child, along with teaching them how to learn, is to teach them that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. That the Bible is the Word of God, not literal, but as spoken through the prophets in the Old Testament, and by Jesus Christ in the New. Whether they choose to have faith is up to them, but they should be taught this alongside the classical philosophers because this is the best way to build a solid foundation. The world is adrift in a sea lies and even though rocks of truth are all around them, they cannot discern the rocks from the water. Those who know to stand on firm ground will have an absolute advantage on the competition. They will also be the only hope for preserving Western Civilization.