Axiom of the Best – Science as Politics

When Plato first introduced the term ‘aristocracy’ (rule by the Best), he established the fundamental mission of Western philosophy to be the ‘discovery’ of the conceptual boundaries that distinguish the Best from the Cattle. By defining a shared understanding of their qualitative superiority over the lesser members of human society, that sense of collective political self-interest would enable the Best to secure and maintain their dominance. With respect to the field of Natural Philosophy, the goal has been to ‘discover’ in Nature an intrinsic hierarchical organization that reflects itself in the aristocratic ordering of human society. We are taught that the introduction of scientific analysis based upon logical coherence and empirical correspondence has displaced that Natural Philosophy tradition. Axiom of the Best – Science as Politics demonstrates the inaccuracy of that claim. Despite the title of his famed work, Charles Darwin offered no significant insight into the Origin of Species that had not already been explained more than a century before. Darwin’s crucial ‘insight’ was the idea that only the Best within a species drive evolutionary advance, and the role of natural selection is to eliminate the Cattle who are not contributing to that advance. That message strongly resonated with the doctrine of the ‘self-made Man’ bringing forth ‘Progress’ which came to dominate the era of the Industrial Revolution, and Darwin’s message has driven the dogma of racial science ever since. In similar fashion, the Relativity theory of Henri Poincaré was given its political punch by Einstein’s contrived interpretation of dilating time and contracting length which defines the perceptual prison in which the Cattle are claimed to be hopelessly trapped. As illustrated in the selected topical summaries below, this book examines the how and why of such political distortions of science and how they continue to help energize the intensifying call to eliminate those who are seen to be obstructing the path toward the Best society.

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