Pressure, Propaganda, and Persecution

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Rene Girard discovered something new, new but very old, about human behavior-- a model for human behavior that he saw operating in society at a very deep level, in large social groups as well as small ones. He called this behavior mimesis. Most people live mimetic lives patterned on what they see around them. They want what others want (thin desires) and never try to identify what their own deep desires (thick desires) might be.

Unfortunately, thin desires do not have the power to lead to a full integration of the human person. Such people are continually trying to "keep up with the Joneses," so they want more of the things that signal wealth, power, and status. They become envious of those who have a better car, the latest sound system, the biggest house, or the most lavish vacation. It can advance to the state of covetousness. It can lead to bitterness, even hatred of those who have what they do not.

Thin desires come from comparing ourselves to others. It is made worse by social media, on places like Meta (formerly Facebook), X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and Instagram. Posts typically show only the best parts of people's lives. Posts can also be used as a soapbox to promote their agendas. Such behavior when coordinated en masse can function as propaganda to produce mimetic behavior.

News channels are mimetic also. They deliver the news, but often they drive their viewers toward the editors' political or social views. Broadcast media have done this for years, but now online sources drive viewers toward their points of view. Even movies and TV cause mimesis. Essentially, any form of mass communication with a widespread audience can be called propaganda and cause mimetic behavior.

In terms of ideas, how is anything new or different ever to find an audience? The answer in our society is to commodify the idea or innovation and sell it to a large corporation with the means to produce or communicate the idea or innovation widely. Unfortunately, anyone with a radical new idea can either be ignored, or be labeled as crazy, or a heretic. Such innovators may be attacked if people feel threatened by this new way of thinking, and thus become scapegoats. The original use of the word scapegoat comes from Leviticus 16. As part of a ritual of atonement, God commands the Israelites to place all their sins on the head of a goat and send it into the wilderness:

21 Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task 22 The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.

This ritual foreshadows the bearing of our sins by Christ. He takes them away. He atones.

Girard recognized this parallel. Christ is the scapegoat, the victim set aside by God to bear our sins, but he is without sin himself.

That is not true in Girard's earlier examples of the scapegoat. Since Christ, the scapegoat is an innocent victim.

We have all seen this scapegoating in operation. The suppression of whistleblowers of all kinds is amplified by propaganda in the media. Those who reveal government malfeasance may lose their jobs, and in some countries, be executed. At the least, their careers are ruined, and all social capital is lost. They are shunned by colleagues and former friends because people fear being tainted by association. Corporate whistleblowers may face similar fates. People who report sexual abuse, assault, or harassment run a gauntlet of interrogations, disbelief, negative social commentary, and harassment in both printed and online form, and then they must testify about the nature of what occurred, often in public. Unfortunately, this persecution can be lifelong. Is it a surprise that many don't come forward?

Suppression of new ideas can occur in any endeavor that depends on holding onto status or power. Even a manager’s desire to avoid the difficulties of change can suppress innovation. This form of suppression can occur in industry, technology, the military, medicine, education, and science. Sadly, as a result, society never benefits from the improvements that were suppressed.

For example, leaders often reject innovations because of their resistance to change. Fixed ideas can be hard to overturn. "Everyone does it this way," "It's not possible," "It won't do any good," or worse, "This idea is heretical and will overturn the existing way of thinking." Such ideas can stop positive change in its tracks. Every one of the organizations I mentioned above can treat innovators badly and destroy creativity and innovation. If the elite think that a particular idea threatens their power and prestige, they may use widespread propaganda and persecution to suppress the new ideas.

I have seen all these behaviors in the scientific community, which is my area of expertise. I have been a research scientist for almost 30 years. I personally have seen persecution of scientists who are Christians. Some have been tossed out or denied degrees. Others see the threat, so they hide their beliefs.

I have seen papers turned down because the reviewer was powerful in their field and suppressed competitors’ work. I have seen grants and papers turned down because the individuals writing the paper held unpopular scientific positions. I have repeatedly seen people lose their jobs because they hold an unpopular view. I have seen misinformation and mockery used against people with unpopular ideas. And I have seen professors pressure graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to be selective in the data they use. All these things are forbidden officially but still happen. The question is, how much do they distort scientific progress?

Just in the last month, I saw a report of bad science by a scientist. He was a graduate student who tried to replicate the work of a well-known group. He could not. After careful work, he determined it was because inappropriate controls were used. Because many others were using the same assay and were publishing based on the faulty design, he wrote to the original lab to tell them, and was ignored. He then wrote up his findings and tried to publish them. He was turned down by the journals he submitted to, and rather than submit to a journal that would be ignored, he ended up publishing in a non-reviewed online site called Archiv that is seen by many. He did this just so people might not have the same difficulty he had--it had wasted months of his fellowship and prevented him from performing the work he came to do.

It is very hard to publish negative results, even if they are important. A student was about to lose his degree because he could not change an enzyme's activity by repeated mutation. Scientists often believe that enzymes can be modified easily. This is because the failures don't get published. A friend who was on the student's committee, and very knowledgeable about enzyme modification, reported that he had to demonstrate to the student's committee that the thing the student had been assigned to do could not be done. This is another way that scientific resources of time and money are wasted.

Sometimes an entire discipline can be held hostage because of propaganda. A well-known case is that of continental drift. Alfred Wegener first published his hypothesis in the early 1900s that the continents moved over geologic time. He accumulated a great deal of evidence from biology, geology, and fossils showing where the continents were originally linked. He called that super-continent Pangaea. Geologists ignored his hypothesis, despite strong evidence supporting it. It wasn't until the 1960s that the idea was accepted, based on evidence of the movement of the northern magnetic pole.

Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are another whole category of the role of mimesis and propaganda, and I don't have space to treat those things fairly. However, I will give one infamous example of doctors behaving badly because of resistance to change. Ignaz Semmelweis was a young doctor who was eagerly following the work of Louis Pasteur. He was aware of Pasteur's work on the role of microbes in disease. The hospital in Vienna where he worked had a mortality rate in obstetrics of 25-30%, which is horrifying. He thought that maybe the childbed fever that was killing women was due to infection carried by the medical students from their dissections to the women in labor. He demanded that all the students wash their hands with a strong antiseptic before seeing women patients. The childbed fever cases dropped dramatically as a result. Some doctors took up his method, but others did not. He had seminars and consultations canceled. He had to leave Vienna and find work elsewhere after his involvement in politics turned everyone in Vienna against him.

He found work in his native Budapest and published his research. He wrote to doctors all over Europe and beyond, but he was ignored. Women continued to die of childbed fever. Semmelweis's mental health deteriorated, and he became angry and bitter at the medical profession’s refusal to change. He died in an insane asylum, where his colleagues had taken him 2 weeks before, from an infected wound inflicted by the guards (who had beaten him), probably from the same bacterium as caused childbed fever.

Sometimes the suppression comes from the government. The restriction on doctors' freedom to use promising treatments during the pandemic was unprecedented. Promising lines of research were shut down. The government of many states issued a mandate: police, firefighters, nurses, transit workers, and many others lost their jobs because for moral reasons they refused to comply with the mandate. Many had to move to other less punitive states. All these things were done to impose Fauci's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and CDC agendas on vaccine implementation. Whatever your views on the virus or the vaccines, such coercion and suppression is wrong. Uniformity of opinion cannot be imposed. As a result, we have had a significant polarization of society.

The closest to home for me is the treatment of intelligent design scientists. Now watch your own reaction. What went through your mind at the mention of intelligent design?

Intelligent design proposes that some things in the universe give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose by a supernatural intelligence. Note that intelligent design theorists do not say that everything points to design, but that some processes certainly do. Nor do they say that everything is designed; natural processes like evolution may have a role to play. And yet, to get the whole thing rolling, there had to be a designer.

The reason for suggesting the existence of a supernatural intelligence is this: the Big Bang, the instant of creation, was the beginning of all space, time, and matter/energy. None of these things existed before, yet at the moment of the Big Bang, the moment of creation, the universe exploded into being. Suddenly matter, space, time, and energy existed. To permit life, the constants of the universe, such as the strength of gravity, or the strong and weak nuclear forces had to have exactly the right values for life to exist. The universal constants that created the conditions for life had to be fine-tuned in advance, If the constants were wrong, the Big Bang would produce a universe that would collapse on itself or expand too fast, or galaxies would never form. Or the elements might not form because there were no stars to form them. Nothing except a pre-existing supernatural intelligence could fine-tune anything. This supernatural being is eternal because it exists outside time; there was no time before the instant of the Big Bang. It has no material corporality because there was no matter at all before the instant of the Big Bang. There was no matter, no time, no space, no energy, and no fluctuating vacuums.

OK, so the universe came into existence at the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. About 4 billion years ago, the planet Earth formed, and 3.3 billion years ago, the first living things appeared as fossilized stromatolites, which are believed to be algal mats made up of cells of blue-green algae. Where did they come from? It had to be some sort of intelligent designer, probably the same one that fine-tuned the universe.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

I will show you why an intelligent designer is needed.

A cell must have proteins to exist. Where did the first proteins come from before there were ribosomes? What is a ribosome and why is it needed?

Ribosomes are molecular machines made of about 70 proteins and 3 long RNAs in modern bacterial cells. They accomplish the synthesis of proteins, using mRNA transcripts that have been copied from DNA, and amino acids. To assemble a ribosome, a sophisticated multistep process that uses helper proteins is necessary.

In ancient cells, ribosomes could have had between 33-50 proteins. Having 33 proteins in a ribosome is marginal because the smallest known cells today live inside other cells, and their ribosomes don't have to work well; they live in optimal conditions where most things are provided for them. These minimal ribosomes with 33 proteins don't work well.

Did ribosomes randomly assemble from 33 different proteins? Highly unlikely. First, the 33 proteins would have to be made without ribosomes. To make a protein without ribosomes is hard to do. Very hard. Imagine amino acids as balls with 3 or more protrusions sticking from them, each protrusion with superglue on it. Put them all in a box and shake them. The balls will stick together in nice orderly chains of 50 or so amino acids, right? Of course not. What they will do is stick to each other in haphazard clumps. Amino acids are sticky and will react with each other in a variety of random ways. To facilitate amino acids sticking together in the right way, you need a ribosome.

Now that you have been extremely lucky and have made all the proteins you need, the ribosome must be assembled. The ribosomes in the first cells would have to assemble from random proteins, not finely adapted ones, and with no help. Random proteins glued together do not a ribosome make.

But for the sake of argument, assume that there are ribosomes to assist in making proteins. There must also be transcripts that specify each protein's amino acid order or "sequence". Proteins can't have their amino acids in just any order. The sequence or order of amino acids is what gives a protein its function. There must be some way to remember the sequence that works. In modern cells, the DNA stores that information, and there is a complex process for copying the right sequence into mRNA, and then getting that mRNA to the ribosome. I don't intend to give a full course in cell biology, but if you are interested, I recommend getting a good book and reading about it. Foresight, by Marcos Eberlin, would be a beginning. It will blow your mind.

To sum up, in the first cell, proteins would have to randomly assemble without mRNA or ribosomes to help.  Then it would be necessary to randomly assemble the ribosome using these same randomly assembled proteins. Only then, when the first impossible random ribosome happened, could amino acids be reliably assembled into protein. There still would be little for natural selection to improve, because at this stage there would be little if any function and there would be no heredity. Later, when there might be some means of storing information, there might be natural selection.

Natural selection requires there be some means of heredity. But if you think proteins and the ribosomes are complicated, the genetic code is far worse. Heredity requires two things: the ability to reliably build proteins using a template, which requires ribosomes, and the ability to code and decode using a whole system of storing, coding, and decoding information. You can't build a functioning first cell without an intelligent designer because the only thing available without a designer at the beginning is randomness and some amino acids. It just won't work. Natural selection can't work until there is something functional enough to select, and a way to remember and reproduce what worked without inheritance. It cannot happen. There are way too many seredipitous steps. A supernatural intelligent designer could, however, make sure things happened as they needed to.

Of course, God fits that job description nicely, but he is unpopular with materialist scientists and has been excluded from science by the philosophical view that says nothing except the material world exists. It should be noted that materialistic atheists have no proof this true. It is simply an assertion based on their philosophical view. Others say that even if supernatural beings do exist, we couldn't weigh or measure them or otherwise detect them, so they can't be studied by science. We can't detect them. Therefore they are not here. This is a logical fallacy. If we can't detect supernatural beings, we can't know whether supernatural beings exist or not. They can't prove or disprove they don't exist.

The ironic thing is that we can detect the signs of evidence of intelligent activity, just as archeologists or forensic scientists do. When we demonstrate something could not have evolved without intelligent guidance, it is evidence for design. There are many such things in chemistry and biology, too many to include here. I have illustrated one of the basic ones.

Just to be clear, the predominant view of scientists is that evolution produced every living thing. It is either an article of faith or it is a view held to accommodate one's colleagues, with good reason. This view is enforced just as strictly as was the Covid Vaccine mandate. If you publicly subscribe to intelligent design, you will lose your job. If you don't lose your job due to seniority, you will be shunned, and it will be very difficult to get your papers published. If you are even suspected of rejecting or doubting evolution, you face extra scrutiny to see if you believe the party line. The evolution mafia is quite effective.

But worse than that, evolutionary propaganda is everywhere--in advertisements, all academic disciplines except maybe music, popular fiction and non-fiction, video games and entertainment, and of course, education. It's hard for young adults to withstand the propaganda once they leave home. Even teens in high school buy the message. I take it back. It is in music, too.

The problem is that this propaganda tends to corrupt our understanding of ourselves. Evolution as a theory of everything is not harmless. Neither is what passes for public discourse. It is a brave soul that dares to take an unpopular point of view.

How much do we lose because of this? We don’t know how many ideas collapse under pressure, or how many improvements have been shut down. How many musicians and artists who weren't fashionable gave up their art, barely scraped by, or starved? People of all sorts with unpopular views either submit and conform or face persecution. Rene Girard saw the scapegoat mechanism everywhere in human history.

Mimesis is not going to go away. We are social creatures, meant to be together. That means social pressure is real and can be intense. Yet in every generation, brave individuals who believe in their ideas, and their cause, resist the pressure. At the deepest level, human beings want to live lives full of meaning and purpose, that builds rather than tears down, that leads to interior freedom and self-actualization. If each person becomes aware of what truly drives them, what their thick desires are, and acts on them, they become true individuals, separate from the pack and capable of creative activity. Their work can bear fruit, even if not in their lifetimes. They may be geniuses or just weirdos, but it is possible for individuals to find and follow their thick desires. and to lead an anti-mimetic life.

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N.B.    A reference to the effect of mimesis in science, from a scientist:

Brown, Patrick T.  I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published. (The Free Press: For Free People), Published September 5, 2023.

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published

Excerpt: "In theory, scientific research should prize curiosity, dispassionate objectivity, and a commitment to uncovering the truth. Surely those are the qualities that editors of scientific journals should value.

In reality, though, the biases of the editors (and the reviewers they call upon to evaluate submissions) exert a major influence on the collective output of entire fields. They select what gets published from a large pool of entries, and in doing so, they also shape how research is conducted more broadly. Savvy researchers tailor their studies to maximize the likelihood that their work is accepted. I know this because I am one of them.

Here’s how it works.

The first thing the astute climate researcher knows is that his or her work should support the mainstream narrative—namely, that the effects of climate change are both pervasive and catastrophic and that the primary way to deal with them is not by employing practical adaptation measures like stronger, more resilient infrastructure, better zoning and building codes, more air conditioning—or in the case of wildfires, better forest management or undergrounding power lines—but through policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. 

So in my recent Nature paper, which I authored with seven others, I focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior. Make no mistake: that influence is very real. But there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely. (A startling fact: over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.)

In my paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of these other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.

A good description of what makes for good science.

The good, the bad and the ugly science: examples from the marine science arena. E. C. M. Parsons and Andrew J Wright. Front. Mar. Sci., 04 June 2015 https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2015.00033