Noicide: dawn of a new Dark Age

Something far more sinister than mere genocide is unfolding in the United States and other advanced nations round the world: the forces of darkness have declared open war on human knowledge.

With the purging of government websites, the banning of a whole vocabulary of words related to climate, gender and other hate issues of the extreme right, termination of science funding and the firing of scientists Trump has at a stroke moved America closer to authoritarian rule than democracy has yet ventured.

Instead of bewailing the cuts, scientists need to recognise this is a class war - the ignoramuses versus the knowledgeable. The ignoramuses plan to stamp out the knowledgeable by any means.

There is a vicious edge to this new form of ethnic cleansing.

Knowledge is power.

Anyone who obliterates it can take power and impose whatever "truth" best suits their criminal, business or political agenda. As is the case in Russia, North Korea and many authoritarian states in the past. And most citizens will meekly bow down to the new ‘truth’, having no other facts to contest it.

By censoring knowledge, so the public cannot see it, the autocrats aim to so confuse and misinform the masses that they can lock in their own perpetual power, elections or no.

This war on human knowledge has been going on for decades, but has reached a peak in the C21st with the avalanche of disinformation unloosed on the world by the $7tr fossil fuels lobby. Led by the Koch family in America, the industry has been devoting an ever-growing portion of its vast profits to obliterating public and scientific knowledge about climate change. This emulated the model used by the tobacco lobby to undermine health warnings – only far more successfully and internationally.

The Trump Administration – a glovepuppet of the fossil fuels sector – has taken the destruction of knowledge a giant stride further, by defunding US climate research, terminating the Federal Department of Education, slashing the Environmental Protection Agency and sabotaging public healthcare.

According to the Rachel Maddow Show, the main methods now being used in the US to suppress science and knowledge are:

1. direct government censorship and the banning of certain words;

2. compliant self-censorship, where scientists are intimidated into conformity;

3. budget cuts to agencies, research programs, grants and aid programs;

4. sacking, intimidation, forced resignations and demoralisation of the workforce;

5. direct bans on specific research;

6. flooding media and social media with bias and disinformation to discredit the facts.

Information vital to science and healthcare globally is being suppressed. In a move comparable to the 1930s Nazi book burnings, words that US extremists find objectionable have been banned from government documents, websites, research applications and general usage. Terms like “climate crisis”, “pollution”, “climate science”, “disability”, “diversity:” and “women” are being purged from the US public lexicon.

It is too easy to dismiss this craziness as peculiar to America. In reality, it is the tip of a global iceberg, led by fossil fuels and a broadening consortium of business oligarchs (who want no governments, taxes. regulations or constraints of any kind on their ‘right’ to plunder people and planet). Globally, liberal economic theory is being displaced by the extremities of the Austrian School of Economics, the proponents of unbridled self-interest – a philosophy with vast appeal to the handful of megarich who now control two thirds of the world’s wealth.

Already, servants of this philosophy are at work converting more governments globally to this mediaeval fantasy of baronial supremacy. Trump’s chief architect, Elon Musk is already hard at work seducing European parliaments into the same sick belief.

The thing these would-be tyrants most fear is an informed and educated populace to challenge them. Hence their desire to overthrow the pillars of science and education in as many countries as they can, to make an uninformed people subservient to their whims.

As a rule, billionaires are poorly educated. They may know a lot about money and business practice, but as a rule have not the faintest idea how the Earth or life itself actually work. Their massive ‘wealth’ convinces them they are geniuses when, in truth, they are ignoramuses who dictate, but seldom listen, read or learn.

There are few things an ignoramus fears and hates more than someone who knows more than they do. Hence the visceral loathing of the billionaire class for the knowledge professions – science, academia, education and medicine. And hence their determination to rub out any knowledge that contradicts the infantile “do whatever I want” philosophy of the Austrian School.

To achieve untrammelled power, the billionaires must eradicate all human knowledge and learning that does not serve their business goals. Led by the fossil fuels sector they are now extending this new Inquisition to other forms of knowledge they perceive as threatening to their ambition to monopolise power and wealth universally.

So, scientists, teachers, doctors, feminists, environmentalists, egalitarians, civil servants, journalists, this is why you now find yourselves up against the wall, facing the firing squad. You are not wanted. In fact, you are an obstacle to the ‘progress’ of the super-rich and must be removed or silenced, one way or t’other.

This is noicide. The destruction of the human mind, its knowledge and its wisdom (from the Greek: nous, noos = mind).

It heralds a new Dark Age in human history, one where money and raw power will do its very best to ensure the truth is dead and there will never be a new Enlightenment or Renaissance.

Unless we all fight back.