Dismissed!

There are plenty of examples in history of individuals who have been brilliant on one topic and controversial on another. Take Marie Curie; a ‘nerd’s nerd who broke the law for knowledge’. A veritable boundary rider, she went on to win 2 Nobel prizes for her scientific discoveries, but also enjoyed a good seance and slept with vials of Radium by her bed because it was ‘pretty’ (a habit that no doubt contributed to her eventual death from aplastic pernicious anaemia). We don’t however dismiss her entire body of scientific work because she dabbled in a bit of witchcraft or didn’t fully understand the dangers of radioactivity.  

Three other Nobel prize winners who would regularly visit an Italian spirit medium in Paris include the physicist Jean Baptiste Perrin, the physiologist Charles Richet and the philosopher Henri Bergson. Are their works that earned them Nobel prizes to be dismissed because of their beliefs in the paranormal? The list of geniuses with ideas that might be considered quirky is long. Newton’s belief in the possibility of alchemy, Pythagorus’ beliefs in reincarnation or Tesla’s almost phobic aversion to pearls, (sending his secretary home if she dared to don a set) to name just a few. We do not seek to nullify their entire lifetime’s output because one particular belief is at odds with our own perception.

In recent times there seems to have developed a culture of looking for reasons to dismiss others rather than finding out what we can learn from them. You might want to also ask yourself if you, hand on heart, would agree with everything you have ever said in the past. Surely, saying yes means you have never learned a thing. Saying no means you shouldn’t dismiss others just because they don’t agree with you on everything. If your first reaction to any particular idea is dismissive scorn without any desire for personal research, this probably says more about your psychological programming than it does about universal truths. 

The catalyst for this article was the latest episode of James Delingpole’s Delingpod, with Dr Mike Yeadon. Listening to it provoked a rising sense of unease when Dr Yeadon very quickly started to voice his feelings about a depopulation agenda. For him, this is the only rational explanation for some of the things we have witnessed over the past 3 years. Whether he is right or wrong on this topic is not the subject of this article. He makes various arguments, which you can assess for yourself.

There are some excellent soundbites in this interview and we recommend that you take the time to listen, regardless of your beliefs on whether nefarious forces would rather there were far fewer of us. Dr Yeadon makes some powerful, scientifically knowledgeable points that are clearly backed up by the level of detailed expertise one would expect from a pharma industry lifer. Here is an excerpt from the Delingpod podcast cited above. Listening, without prejudice, to a varied set of opinions (and perhaps focusing even more closely on those being censored) may become the most valuable skill of our time:

“Considering they’d only taken a few months, at best, from deciding this is the one, to actually rolling out first jabs, they wouldn’t have had time to develop even the basic tests that you require to set the specifications, demonstrate what the range is each time. It takes years and years and years to do this. Every time you scale up for example, every time you go from 100 grams to a kilogram, to 10kg, you have to start again, because chemical reactions often occur differently as you go to a higher and higher scale. And then you have to iterate based on what you’ve learned. What are the tests? What are the limits? and so on, and how to manufacture to stay within the tramlines.”

So here comes the difficulty. Once you are persona non grata for one of your beliefs, you become an ‘untouchable’. This culture of instant dismissal for an unpopular belief (regardless of whether it is accurate or not) has been exponentially rising in prominence in the last decade. It has led to a culture of self-censorship amplified by ‘social’ media algorithms which merrily curate your timeline into a homogenous soup of unilateral agreement, obscuring anyone who may challenge your worldview. These apps work deviously on your dopamine pathways in very skilful ways, whether you like it or not.  

For those of us who tentatively veered away from The Mainstream Narrative™ over the last 3 years, we have butted heads and had endless heated debates on many topics. From germ theory to the existence of asymptomatic spread to the very existence of viruses, there was a somewhat universal feeling that everything was back on the table for re-examination. Theories that were taken for granted had to be defended from first principles. And in this continued spirit of open and unfettered debate, we at HART have had the luxury of an open-minded forum to expand our knowledge and, if necessary, be proven wrong and change our minds. Many of us now embrace the moniker ‘conspiracy theorist’ as a badge of honour, synonymous as it seems to be with being a critical thinker, who is prepared to disagree at the risk of social ostracism. 

So this piece is really about resisting the urge to dismiss anyone a priori just because you disagree on one particular point. Listen anyway, and consider carefully why you disagree. Where did you get your certainty that they are wrong? Would anyone stand to benefit from this view? Could you have fallen prey to a highly sophisticated propaganda campaign? 

Closed loop systems are doomed to fail. They thwart knowledge growth and will be the downfall of humanity if allowed to flourish. We are continually being cognitively herded into echo chambers online. In real life, we must continue to listen respectfully to each other, consider alternate views and engage in healthy debate, instead of allowing giant corporations to do our thinking for us. The complexity and potential of the human brain is not replicable in machine form, unless we consent to our own psychological hijacking.