"The rise of the West is due to a single accident: we discovered truth telling. We are the only people who discovered it, and we paid the high cost to establish it as a commons – as normative infrastructure – in manners, ethics, morality, law, philosophy and science. It is truth telling that separates the West from the rest. All Western excellences are the consequential result of truth telling. The ‘killer apps’ of Western civilization are the product of a single technology:
...truth telling.
"Science at its purest is nothing but the art of separating that which is truth from that which is not. Today, if not throughout history, we see science as physically constrained and separate from social, moral, and spiritual subjects. It is less ‘troublesome’ to speak the truth about the physical world than it is about human affairs. As such science tried to constrain itself to those areas, except where brave souls like Aristotle, Livy, Machiavelli, Smith, and Hume, and most importantly Darwin. The synoptical historians Toynbee, Durant, Quigley, Huntington, Mallory, Keegan, and intellectual historians Duchesne, and Hicks. The social scientists: Weber, Pareto, Michels, and Durkheim. And today’s cognitive scientists, and experimental psychologists: Searle, Pinker, Kahneman, and Haidt.
"But these empirical souls could not compete with the propagandists who tried to unseat them. From Freud’s attempt to obscure Nietzsche using pseudoscience. To the psychologizing of the postmodernists. From Boas’s pseudoscience in an attempt to obscure Darwin. From Keynes’s use of pseudoscience to obscure the empiricists and moral “conservative” economists, through today’s combination of Krugman, DeLong, Stiglitz, and their allies who advocate ‘immoral economics’ if consumption is maintained, even if consumption could be maintained in exchange for moral reforms of immoral bureaucracies, tax evasion, and unproductive working hours."
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