The “scientific” war on our freedom
Wed 9:47 am +00:00, 13 Aug 2025
Source: https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/08/08/the-scientific-war-on-our-freedom/
If it was a certain kind of religious thinking that paved the road to this modern hell, then it was a certain kind of scientific thinking that pushed us on the bus that brought us here.
Morris Berman writes of his conviction that “the fundamental issues confronted by any civilization in its history, or by any person in his or her life, are issues of meaning“. [1]
And he adds: “Historically, our loss of meaning in an ultimate philosophical or religious sense – the split between fact and value which characterizes the modern age – is rooted in the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”. [2]
The Scientific Revolution, it is clear to me, was nothing less than a philosophical declaration of war on traditional ways of thinking and living, particularly those of Britain and Europe.
Berman points out: “Once natural processes are stripped of immanent purpose, there is really nothing left in objects but their value for something, or someone, else.
“Max Weber called this attitude of mind zweckrational, that is, purposively rational, or instrumentally rational.
“Embedded within the scientific program is the concept of manipulation as the very touchstone of truth. To know something is to control it.
“This identification, in effect, renders all things meaningless, except insofar as they are profitable or expedient…
“The medieval Thomistic (Christian-Aristotelian) synthesis, that saw the good and the true as identical, was, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, irrevocably dismantled”. [3]
He writes regarding René Descartes and Francis Bacon: “Both made it clear that Aristotelianism had had its day. The very title of Bacon’s work, New Organon, the new instrument, was an attack on Aristotle, whose logic had been, in the Middle Ages, collected under the title Organon“. [4]
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he says, Baconianism promoted the identification of truth with utility, specifically industrial utility.
The old ways of thinking were to be replaced by the domination of “the mechanical arts”. [5]
“What Descartes does, really, is provide Bacon’s technological paradigm with strong philosophical teeth”. [6]
“Bacon is convinced that knowledge is power and truth utility; Descartes sees certainty as equivalent to measurement, and wants science to become a ‘universal mathematics’.
“Bacon’s goal, of course, was realized by Descartes’ means: precise measurement not only validates or falsifies hypotheses, it also enables the construction of bridges and roads”. [7] 
Descartes’ philosophy of separation – from the cosmos, from nature, from our own bodies – was based on a “schizoid duality”, says Berman.
He explains that, like a schizophrenic, Descartes pictured his mind as being a mere observer of his body and thus also not part of the wider physical world. [8]
This is totally the opposite of the traditional nature-based spirituality I have recently been discussing, with its knowledge of belonging to everything around us.
It is noteworthy that dreams, regarded for millennia as a primary means through which we can receive messages from the Whole, are regarded from Descartes’ scientific perspective as having no meaning or relevance. [9]
This same rejection of natural wisdom, of humanity’s shared common sense, today fuels the life-denying techno-totalitarian and transhumanist globalist agenda.
Isaac Newton’s approach was likewise not based on the “why” of scientific enquiry but on the “how” of industrial utility.
He could not explain what gravity was, but he could observe and measure it and this was all that mattered for his kind of science. [10] 
Quantity and measurability formed the backbone of this sterile “philosophy” and its positivist approach remains at the core of contemporary science as well as of the “economics” that drives the relentless advance of so-called “growth”, “innovation” and “modernisation”.
Berman writes: “In the course of the seventeenth century Western Europe hammered out a new way of perceiving reality…
“The acid test of existence is quantifiability, and there are no more basic realities in any object than the parts into which it can be broken down”. [11]
“We threw out the baby with the bathwater. We discounted a whole landscape of inner reality because it did not fit in with the program of industrial or mercantile exploitation”. [12]
The philosophical war obviously had a practical purpose – its “elevation of technology to the level of a philosophy” [13] was intended to usher in a regimented industrial-imperialist society, together with vast profit and power for the greedy few.
Scientific thinking thus also amounted to a political attack on the people and specifically on the authentic grassroots radicalism which had been unleashed in the English Civil War from 1642 to 1651.
Groups like the Diggers and the Ranters held the kind of views that are still feared and despised by the ruling class today.
Gerrard Winstanley, for instance, combined a political belief that “true freedom lies in the free enjoyment of the earth” with a spiritual connection to this same earth that “brought us all forth; that as a true mother loves all her children”. [14]
Not only were these radicals crushed by Cromwell once they had helped him gain power, but their “unscientific” nature-based way of thinking had also to be extinguished so that the country could be pushed down the grim path of industrial imperialism.
Says Berman: “After the Restoration, the mechanical philosophy was seen by the ruling elites as the sober antidote to the enthusiasm of the last two decades.
“From 1655 onward there was a series of conversions to the mechanical philosophy by men who had previously been sympathetic to alchemy.
“The conversions were thus part of the reaction against enthusiasm on the part of the propertied classes and leading members of the Church of England, groups that coalesced in the Royal Society itself.
“Thomas Sprat, in the earliest history of the Society (1667), viewed the mechanical philosophy as helping to instill respect for law and order, and claimed that it was the job of science and the Royal Society to oppose enthusiasm”. [15]
I will be taking a look at the dubious origins of the Royal Society in a forthcoming essay…
The triumph of the Puritan view of life, was, as Weber showed, [16] the perfect preparation for the industrial age, forging a robotic personality-type oriented towards work, submission, patient endurance and self-restraint.
Our natural freedom was confiscated and today, as Berman acknowledges, the prison bars of industrial modernity enclose every aspect of our existence.
“Keeping free from the System is not a viable option. As technological and bureaucratic modes of thought permeate the deepest recesses of our minds, the preservation of psychic space has become almost impossible”. [17]
We all suffered the sinister and unprecedented encroachment of this system into our personal lives during the Covid attack and we are now facing the looming threat of digital ID, digital currency, social credit scores, impact slavery [18] and the techno-gulag smart cities in which our overlords want to confine us.
The whole industrial-scientific “revolution”, launched 400 years ago, therefore amounts to a war on our being.
Stresses Berman: “Scientific consciousness is alienated consciousness: there is no ecstatic merger with nature, but rather total separation from it…
“The logical end point of this world view is a feeling of total reification: everything is an object, alien, not-me; and I am ultimately an object too, an alienated ‘thing’ in a world of other, equally meaningless, things.
“This world is not of my own making; the cosmos cares nothing for me, and I do not really feel a sense of belonging to it.
“What I feel, in fact, is a sickness in the soul”. [19]
