The Crisis is the Revolution
To help weather the fecal tsunami produced by the worldwide pseudoscientific paradigms that are blinding the masses, I thought it timely to revisit Thomas Kuhn’s, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I was in search of a ray of hope, for what a drill sergeant might call blinding flashes of the obvious. I bought the 50th anniversary edition of his 1962 thesis, which expanded and redefined the term paradigm to the point that it became overused.
According to Kuhn, after an undefined pre-scientific period of loose inquiry, three phases emerge in the development of a scientific community. His first phase is that of normal science. The second is crisis driven by anomalies. The third phase is a revolution, which results in a paradigm change in the scientific community. An older, disproved paradigm gives way to a new one that answers or accommodates the anomalies that characterize the crisis.
I first encountered Kuhn, while I was an undergraduate studying philosophy in the 1980’s. During those years of optimism (dissipation), I spent enough time studying at the Southborough, Massachusetts branch of Francis A. Schaeffer’s L’Abri to be described by a worker there as a piece of the furniture. Some at L’Abri applied Kuhn’s scientific paradigm change model to Christian apologetics. Schaeffer wrote of pressing unbelievers to face the logic of their false presuppositions in an effort to expose suppressed anomalies, thereby forcing them into crises and making them open to the truth of Christianity. For Kuhn and Schaeffer, crisis driven by anomaly is a force that leads to revolution or conversion resulting in the new paradigm or fresh focus.
Schaeffer worked, wrote, prayed, and hoped for a Christian revival and reformation that would lead to a constructive revolution affecting all of life–a paradigm shifting spiritual and conceptual revolution that would bring perceptions of reality into Christian focus. He was critical of any professed Christian faith that piously illuminated only a private religious sphere of consciousness while leaving daily existential reality shrouded in darkness. For Schaeffer, a dichotomy between an encapsulated upper-story religion and concrete everyday reality leads to a deficient worldview. While the commensurate lower-story vacuum is readily filled with lies and deception. This is surely how we live currently. We are awash in hellish lies that are readily believed by many who nonetheless profess what are often mutant, emasculated, shadows of a waning Christianity. The trajectory of their reflections on current affairs, rather than being clarified by a robust faithful focus, are adjudicated by the demonic kaleidoscopic lenses of the world spirit.
What I quickly realized in revisiting Kuhn’s work is that currently anomalies and crises have become the revolution. Angst and chaos are the goals of the elites who prescribe pseudoscientific paradigms. Anomalies that might drive conversions in Kuhn’s model are squelched, censored, redefined, or subsumed. Spurious crises are purposely created, staged, and used to the advantage of the elites. The crisis is the revolution. Kuhn’s dialectic is cut off from its progress and goals by the prevailing Masonic, daemonic, chthonic, global hegemonic forces in control of the narratives.
The censoring elites with their fact checkers on social media are not so much checking facts but sniffing for any opposing conceptual frameworks and filtering out anything that challenges the false worldview composed of false paradigms. They may allow some limited criticism and discussion within their superficial construct as a pressure releasing safety valve, but they cannot tolerate anything substantive that may shake or puncture their false edifices. They ridicule, deride, and marginalize any serious threats to their agenda. Pseudoscientific paradigms are powerful tools of the globalist elites in support of their imperative for impoverishment, depopulation and enslavement and they ardently shield them from any serious scrutiny.
Why is it so easy for an elite minority to maintain a constant state of lies and chaos? Why are the pseudoscientific paradigms accepted and popularized? In answering this I owe a debt to Thomas Fleming for his articulation of Jonathan Swift’s epistemology of capax rations - that man is capable of reason if unlikely to exercise it. Most do not live an examined life; most do not choose to think and will not perceive when a paradigm is false but simply work within it rather than challenge it. They seem unable to acknowledge they are being manipulated. The Apostle Paul in his second letter to Timothy, warns of such a time when people will “turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables.”
In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul writes that we only know in part, and we see through a glass darkly and that ultimately our knowledge will be destroyed. Knowledge exists but it is partial and clouded. This seems humbling enough to offer some justification for Kuhn’s dialectical struggle, however in Romans 1, Paul also describes unbelievers suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. Theirs is a stifling, twisting, contortion of truth for diabolical and self-serving ends. In Ephesians 4, he warns of the wickedness and cunning craftiness of men who lie in wait to deceive.
Paul’s answer to this is to do the truth in charity. In 2 Corinthians Paul states that we can “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God.” Truth can penetrate the false worlds of those who, in the words of Isaiah, hatch snake’s eggs and weave cobwebs. Cross contextual persuasive communication in love is possible if difficult. While incommensurability among those operating within disparate opposing paradigms is suggested in some critical interpretations of Kuhn’s model, it need not always prevail even if our conversations, (particularly those attempted on social media) indicate otherwise.
A true constructive revolution would sanctify a genuine woke populace that would exercise a desire to confront and defeat the unjust warmongers, deep state, and deep church bureaucrats, big pharma, and their proxy allopathic poison pushers, banksters, pedophiles, pederasts, globalists, fake scientists, and soul-sick modernist psyop-perpetrating media elites. Such a revolution would energize Kuhn’s dialectic as its ability to be captured, truncated, and twisted toward falsehood would be checked within the context of an epistemology of Christian love where substantial critical scrutiny can prevail. For Kuhn’s thesis to be helpful, the first paradigm shift must be the most radical. It must be a shift from corrupt legacy of Cogito, ergo sum to Amor, ergo sum - I am loved, therefore I am, in the context of which, our Savior commands “Peace, be still” to the perfect storm of lies and deception.
Frank DeRienzo is a retired Special Forces Lieutenant Colonel. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Gordon College and an MBA from the University of Massachusetts and is a graduate of the US Army Defense Language Institute. He currently works with eLearning technology.
A true constructive revolution can start in the RC church by allowing priests to marry except for the bishops, archbishops and cardinals.
Pseudoscientific studies were used to justify the rapid use of the covid vaccines. The couple who developed the Pfizer covid vaccine worked for twenty years to develop a vaccine for cancer. But they saw money in the bag and sold the company for $1.4 billion dollars. These researchers and others developed vaccines in record splitting time. Pseudoscience coming out of big Pharma. People couldn’t get masks fast enough to protect themselves. They suddenly became research subjects of big Pharma. Machiavelli’s statement that the end justifies the means applies regarding the covid vaccines. Machiavelli believed that it is okay to do something wrong as long as the end result was good. I’m not sure how good the end result was for the common people.
Hi Dot, You might enjoy this lecture by Dr Fleming’s on Machiavelli: https://fleming.foundation/2016/08/boethius-book-club-episode-7-machiavellis-discourse/
Thank for recommending Machiavelli -discourse. It was very enlightening for me. I would like to have heard more by way of the conclusion.
Mr. DeRienzo, I probably got it wrong, but Dr. Fleming mentioned in the lecture about Machiavelli the importance of the character of the people and the loss of religion. In NC there have been about 8 churches that have closed, one in the small town where I live. The country is at a standstill because politically it is so divided.
Hi Dot, You are seeing in NC what all the faithful are seeing. You are surely in good company here pointing it out.
Thanks, Dot, for raising an important issue. One of the big problems faced by North Carolinians and Virginians–certainly not the only one–has been the influx of Yankees, Yorkers, and Midwesterners. Two of my children live in “the research Triangle,” and among the people they know they are distinctive in being born in the South. My few experiences of Winston-Salem-Greensboro in recent years have left an even worse impression. In Charleston, I had a stockbroker friend, from a well-to-do family that came from the Soviet Block. He and his socially prominent wife had gone to the right schools and they were constantly expressing disdain for middle class people they labeled as rednecks. I liked the couple, but I cannot imagine that in 45 years they have changed their attitudes. Why should they? Charleston and the Carolina Low Country in general are overrun with well-to-do Yankees escaping the consequences of the mistakes made by them and their ancestors. As my favorite bumper-sticker used to say, “I don’t give a damn they do things up North!”
The wild herd is moving east from California and south from New England. They migrate like the Wildebeests — homeless types looking not necessarily for a home but a good deal in the next “housing market” . Too many times I hear the GOP movers and popularizers boast about what a good job some southern Governor is doing because everyone is moving to Texas, Florida, Georgia etc, I encourage them along like an old Drover —on to Atlanta!! On to Houston, on to Dallas!! New Orleans… and Florida is wonderful too.
Southerners are not stupid though, so like the tar baby many of them, they say nothing! .
Born in Revere, MA, raised on the New Hampshire boarder and now a refugee in rural Georgia, I must agree wholeheartedly. It been often pointed out (at least here on FF and in writings on Abbeville Inst) that the Yankee mindset is infected by a prevailing spirit of Gnosticism. Scratch a secularized Puritan and he bleeds dualism. His city on a hill is an Alcatraz except that rather than circling in the waters, the sharks run the municipality. Any constructive revolution must exorcise the Gnostic spirit and break its demonic paradigm. They need more focus on blood and soil and less focus on abstractions and mirages.
Have been enjoying your posts and comments Mr. DeRienzo. It is only with great difficulty and trepidation that one can wade in and out of the company of gnostics because their number is legion and their fruits are too many to quantify as our sociologists and pollsters so often attempt to do. Mr Navrozov recently noticed in a recent reflection that there is almost always something enticing or attractive or good in most of it as well. For instance I really believe that what’s left of the old post war political culture today could do a lot worse than rereading James Burnham but equally convinced they could do a lot better too.
Spirits are like the sun, so obvious as to be obscure most of the time. Usually a people will relearn or rediscover the reality of spirits from their experiences from the worst kind. The local fruits of blood and soil as you say are much different than those from blood and the streets, or blood and the battlefield, blood and ideology but they all have their peculiar spirits.
Thank you for your posts and I hope there will be more ahead.
DeRienzo and Mr. Reavis: I was born in Taunton, MA. I have a cousin who came from Revere, MA. My grandparents left Sao Miguel, Azores, Portugal in the early 20th century to seek a better life for their themselves and their family. They got what they wished for. I thank them for their courage. People seem to forget that it took the courage of their ancestors to say goodbye to their families in the “old country” to start a new life here.
I don’t know what you’re talking about regarding Gnosticism. All I know is that in Massachusetts, especially where I grew up, there were new immigrants (green horns) and those who were here for a longer while. The ancestry of those in southern New England were new and old English, Irish, French, Portuguese and Polish. They were mostly Catholic.
Thank God for the Boston Tea Party and Paul Rever’s ride.
You and Mr. Reavis are globalizing about the people in New England. I have been away for Massachusetts for many years, but I still am who I am and have good memories of where I came from.
My late husband and I and our children moved to NC in Dec. 1971. We stayed in a two-bedroom apartment and one night two of the children’s bicycles were stolen. It took a year to get a house built because the workers showed up when they felt like it. When it was finally completed, we found the house vandalized- paint on the carpeting, a light fixture ripped off, and a whole in the ceiling of one of the bedrooms.
Don’t even mention how great the south is compared to the big bad north.
Dear Dot,
Yes I have met several nice people who
work or reside in New York, Boston and New Hampshire. It doesn’t take much to appear nice in those places. I liked North Carolina much better. Oklahoma too for that matter.
But I admit there is a difference between the yankee collective and the southern particular. There are nice people, crooks and criminals everywhere these days, as they say.
Mr. Reavis,
I don’t know what you’re talking about when you wrote “there is a difference between the Yankee collective and the southern particular”. New York is a big state. New York, NY is jam packed with people many of whom don’t live there but live on Long Island, N.J. or Connecticut. Most of New York State is agricultural.
I lived in Maywood N.J. and Morristown, N.J. for a short time and loved it. We moved here to NC from Buffalo, NY and liked Buffalo very much.
Boston is terrible to get around. Part of the reason is because the streets in central Boston follow the same path as Paul Revere’s ride when he declared, “The British are Coming”. I doubt if Oklahoma was around then.
Mr. Reavis,
The only reason why we moved to NC is because of my husband’s work as a textile chemist and colorist while living in Buffalo. When we moved to NC, he was in charge of a technical service lab. I learned quickly that the textile jobs were located here in the south, and no longer located in the north like Lowell, Taunton and Fall River, MA. The jobs were lost to the south because owners of the textile mills could offer cheap labor. The mill workers lived in small mill houses owned by the textile owners and when they were paid, they purchased food, clothing and other supplies at the local mercantile store which was owned by the textile owners.
Thank G-d this is not the case anymore. I think companies and people are moving south because the south has land, and a better deal can be made for the company.
Dear Dot,
Yes, I am sure the mills moving south were driven by economics , some say even Paul Revere’s famous ride was. And as you noted , the state of Oklahoma was not even established although they say the red dirt or “ Okla Homa” along the Red River and the “Red man” was all here waiting to be exploited, included, cultivated, canceled, developed, diminished, etc depending on who is telling the story.
I enjoy your stories very much and hope you will keep posting them.