Intellectual Colonization (part 1)
And excerpt from the book "The Physician’s War"
Please join the discussion about Intellectual Colonization.
I have joined Dr Lawrence Lynn to publish a book explaining how critical care entrapped itself in misconceptions, and how it was publicly exposed by COVID-19.
In the book, we present the apical mistakes made by thought leaders from the past and reproduced in good trust by the younger generations. We are talking about ARDS and sepsis, and the dire consequences of lacking a treatment for the syndromes.
We are genuinely afraid that such mistakes will outlive us and our readers as well, causing critical care to fade definitively into scientific irrelevance. We have identified the mechanisms that perpetuate the error.
Intellectual Colonization is one of them.
The Physician’s War
The Story of the Hidden Battle between Physicians and a Science Based on Pathological Consensus
Please find the book on Amazon
Intellectual Colonization
[excerpts from Chapter 14]
(…) A list of the perceived limitations of the research is diligently provided in the discussion of every RCT but there is no mention that the fundamental idea of lumping massive numbers of highly diverse diseases with different drivers might be the fatal problem. (…)
Each new generation of scientists is fooled because synthetic science has all the trappings and appearances of real science. It behaves like real science. Massive NIH grants are awarded, recognition awards are passed out, beribboned experts expound the consensus from the lecterns, randomized controlled trials are performed and oversight is provided by expert statisticians. There are pro-con sessions, annual meetings, highly rated publications in journals with elite editors, and as we will see, even shifting paradigms. However, discovery, the lynchpin and the most difficult part of true science, is missing from synthetic science, replaced by rumination and a routine recycling of the consensus of experts. Yet no one seems to notice, because, as Popper points out, they have been taught a technique but were not taught to ask…. why?
Those practicing synthetic science believe it is their responsibility to teach these methods to other scientists in less advanced countries and to promulgate the rules in the interest of the less advantaged. This is a form of “intellectual colonization”.
Intellectual colonization with synthetic science is analogous to a benevolent (…) perceiving that it is [the colonizer's] responsibility (…) to show those less advanced natives how to (…) [perform clinical research]
The idea of intellectual colonization should be understood as a lasting consequence of the centuries of European colonization of the rest of the world. In the last years of the 15th century, Europe had lost access to trade routes with the East. Portugal and Spain's great navigators boldly tried to reach India by crossing the unknown waters of the Atlantic, in a firm belief in a then-unproven and counter-intuitive theory that the Earth is round. We can only imagine how frightening it was to the layman to embark on this trip, betting his life on calculations he couldn't understand.
Of course, navigators couldn't reach the East because they found a continent later called America on their way. They found a more suitable solution: navigate south around Africa, and then north and eastwards to the shores of India, China, and Japan, inaugurating a new era.
By that time, the pioneering countries, Portugal and Spain, dominated world navigation to the extent that it was natural that they divided the globe in two parts. That is precisely what they did in the Tordesillas treaty, literally drawing a line to divide their future discoveries. Readers outside Latin America now understand why Brazil speaks Portuguese and the rest of the continent speaks Spanish. Both countries controlled large, productive colonies, and their ships allowed them to trade with the whole world.
Other Western European countries followed suit, and for the following centuries, the world was dominated by European colonial powers, causing extensive development and accumulation in Europe, and definitively shaping the other countries under the weight of European influence. Of course, this is merely an introduction to discuss Intellectual Colonization. If the above lines enticed the reader to History, please go on and read serious texts. It is so important to know the movements that shaped our world.
European colonizers seeded their culture everywhere. In each country, there was an elite holding connections to the colonizers and benefiting from a system of privileges, and there was the rest, those not connected to European culture. The elite saw and still sees itself as a continuation of Europe and is, to some extent, an ethnic continuation of Europeans, especially in Latin America and areas of Africa.
Every attempt to understand the colonized countries must account for the dialectic tension between those nationals who see themselves as diverted Europeans and the rest. In this societal context, the display of European values and references is still a sign of where one stands in society.
The British Empire, arguably the last of the largest Western empires, has had such an influence that no further description is necessary. Let's focus on its more important legacy: the English language itself. English is definitely the language of commerce and the language of science, everywhere in the world. It became the contemporary lingua franca, the language used for any exchange between people who don't share the same native language. The era of the great colonial empires ended abruptly in the world wars in the last century's first half. The United States of America then emerged as the leading power in almost all human affairs, the true heir of Western influence. The English language is the vehicle of American influence. (…)
British and American influence shape the science industry everywhere. There are many countries where English is the language of medical schools. Even in places where Medicine is taught in the native language, senior medical students are expected to be proficient in English. Accordingly, English fluency is a bright part of any curriculum vitae. It is hard to explain to a native speaker of English how wide and open the world of Medicine and sciences in general gets when you learn English.
Now you can see how Intellectual Colonization works. Medical researchers are among the intellectual elite everywhere, including the colonized countries. The elite of such countries look to the United States and Western Europe as the ultimate source of value and validation. A sure sign of accomplishment in life is to afford a peregrination through Europe, to see the feats of Western heritage in loco. Even a bus trip inside a European capital may become an experience of transcendental value. When it comes to science, (…)