Quick critique

I'd say that one paragraph in the middle about the system not being broken could use some elaboration. Under the current system there really is no way to know that the good ideas move forward and the lesser ones get trampled. The open democratic review allowed to government is the only real way to approach a larger "truth."

The author hints at this in his final paragraph- that we must discover our "inner" scientists. That doing this on the scale required to adequately judge science's results is practically speaking impossible. No single person has access to the body of materials (to say nothing of the time) to conduct all the experiments required to make an informed judgment - that is why it is so insidious.

Perhaps a version of "League of Women Voters" could emerge to challenge scientific dogma on behalf of the voter/scientific recipient. But such interest groups would lack a core constituency the way AARP or the Sierra Club do, for example.

The real solution is to dispense with the illusion of scientific truth in the first place and find some other more subjective anchoring for our world view. As I mentioned above, the "truth" arrived at by science is only temporary anyway- so far there have been no scientific experiments that have not been undermined by some later ones. The terminus of that sequence of undermining comes in the quantum physics movement which suggests that our experience is, in fact, at least as subjective as it is objective (as ying as yang, you could say). Yet we persist in the delusion of "eternal objectivity" which is science's claim on "truth" and therefore authority.

This is the where the system is, in fact, broken, just as the Medieval "indulgences" indicated the brokenness of the old Catholic system of truth. The West favors the masculine over feminine - "truth" over subjectivity. This is so much a part of our culture that when we decide to 'liberate' women, we allow them to be formed only in the model of men. We do not honor their changeable subjectivity in its own right. The prejudice is do ingrained in our culture that we hardly even see it as such, but rather convince ourselves that it is a moral virtue to be non-feminine, orderly, "correct," and rational. It would almost seem immoral to Westerners to value such things as chaos, irrationality, and subjectivity. Yet taken to the extreme, our masculine-driven scientific machine shows itself to be wholly subjective, confused, and irrational.

This is the classic Chinese case for balance, as the Yang cedes to the Ying in its extreme. We, having little or no place for the Ying, have nothing for the Yang to flow into, and so it just breaks, as science has already broken.

As you can imagine, if we were to all of a sudden "dispense" with science, what would emerge under our feet would be total chaos. We have so linked our fate to the fashions of the university mind that we are lost without them. So we will fight to maintain our system and further harden the yang principle against the ying until nature simply rebels uncontrollably and balance is restored.

The hippies have been predicting this, Krugman-like, for years. Thomas Friedman recently made the case that Mother Nature and the Stock Market conspired to bring about the catastrophic downturn of 2008. Could be. My personal feeling is that while we attempt to squish the irrational principle into oblivion, she nonetheless lives through our daily lives unseen. She takes the form of sickness, obesity, unhappiness, malaise, and futility that mark so much of modern life. So perhaps nature's revenge has been upon us all along. Perhaps, then, it is us who have chosen to notice her now, rather than squeeze that much harder.