Receiving a Fair Hearing
It is a rare event in today’s world.
In Ed Herman’s Beyond Hypocrisy he presented his Doublespeak Dictionary, and one of his pithy definitions is: “Truth: Emissions from the mouths of the powerful.”
In 2022, I began an essay that I hope to complete one day, on receiving a fair hearing. In our world of scarcity and fear, dominated by elites and abetted by nearly everybody, almost nothing receives a fair hearing. False “facts” and bogus ideas are given widespread dissemination (propaganda), while true information is censored and brilliant and vital ideas are banished from polite discussion.
When Ed invented his Propaganda Model, Noam Chomsky considered it a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals face in capitalist societies. Noam generalized it even further and said that the Old Testament’s “prophets” were the intellectuals of their day and they were punished from dissenting from elite “truth.” Noam’s first political essay of note was on the responsibility of intellectuals to call out elite deceptions instead of enable them. But Noam’s political writings far more often described the failures of intellectuals to live up to that responsibility.
The chapters of that essay are currently on why we need fair hearings, why they have been rare, and I provide examples in science, medicine, technology, the media, history, politics, and the paranormal. In what I call the Fifth Epoch, those forces of propaganda and censorship will no longer exist, so I expect that fair hearings will be the norm, not something that rarely happens.
Galileo and Bruno had rough rides for challenging Church dogma on Earth’s place in the universe. We no longer burn dissidents at the stake, but our system ruins their lives and careers, and quite a few have come to untimely ends when their views or innovations posed an immediate threat to elite interests.
Brian O’Leary’s life was shortened when he ran a UFO conference and turned down an “offer” by the American military to do classified UFO research. He never quite came out and discussed the situation publicly (this is as close as he came), because he was afraid that they would finish the job if he spoke out. The closer that somebody comes to upsetting the elite applecart, the harsher their treatment will be (such as Dennis Lee’s).
But for the vast majority of the time, the lies are swallowed by virtually everybody and they enforce the dogma on their peers, without the need for elite intervention. The public is so brainwashed from their cradles that hardly anybody ever questions their indoctrination and conditioning, and that is the biggest reason why receiving a fair hearing is so rare today. The system largely runs on autopilot.
I am going to present an excerpt of that current draft, below:
“In the 1870s, James Croll proposed that variations in Earth’s orbit impacted the ice age that had recently been recognized in humanity’s recent past. By 1900, his idea was discarded and forgotten by orthodoxy. In 1913, Milutin Milanković proposed a similar idea, which was gradually accepted and became the primary explanation in the 1970s, a century after Croll proposed it.
“In 1905, Konstantin Mereschkowski proposed that complex cells arose from simple ones via symbiosis. He was ridiculed by his peers for his ideas, which were not vindicated until the 1980s, when Lynn Margulis’s endosymbiotic hypothesis was finally embraced by orthodoxy. Margulis also endured a generation of severe criticism from orthodoxy before her hypothesis was finally accepted.
“In 1908, Kristian Birkeland proposed an explanation for the auroras in Earth’s atmosphere. His hypothesis was ridiculed and attacked by the day’s leading scientists, he died in obscurity in 1917, and his hypothesis was fiercely dismissed. It was not until Hannes Alfvén won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics that Birkeland’s hypothesis was finally vindicated.
“In 1912, Alfred Wegener proposed the idea that the continents moved, which became the “continental drift” hypothesis. His idea was harshly dismissed by orthodoxy, and he died during fieldwork in Greenland in 1930, while working in his primary field of meteorology. It was not until the 1960s that the rise of plate tectonic theory proved him right.
“Those examples above were for scientific ideas that had no immediate economic impact, and so were relatively “innocent.” None of those are trivial theories, and most of them form the foundations of branches of today’s science.”
I may post other excerpts in the future.