25AR30-23

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AR 30:23 - TOTALITARIANISM vs. moderation and common sense

In this issue:

PARANORMALISM - "how fragmented our understanding of what is real and what is not has become"

SOCIALISM - black economist Thomas Sowell explains it well

TOTALITARIANISM - centralized, absolute state control over society

Apologia Report 30:23 (1,712)
June 27, 2025

PARANORMALISM

The new release promo for The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science, by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling <www.tinyurl.com/y4w4xmba> describes it as "A surprising and compelling journey into the business of paranormal investigation, and the state of scientific literacy in America.

   "In 2010, in a small New Hampshire town, next door to a copy center and framing shop, a ghost lab opened. The Kitt Research Initiative's mission was to use the scientific method to document the existence of spirits. Founder Andy Kitt was known as a straight-shooter; and was unafraid - perhaps eager - to offend other paranormal investigators by exposing the fraudulence of their less advanced techniques. But when KRI started to lose money, Kitt began to seek funding from the paranormal community, attracting flocks of psychics, alien abductees, witches, mediums, ghost hunters, UFOlogists, cryptozoologists and warlocks from all over New England, and the world. And there were plenty of them around.

   "The Ghost Lab tells the astonishing story of the wild ecosystem of paranormal profiteers and consumers, through the astonishing story of what happened in this one small town. But it also maps the trends of declining scientific literacy, trust in institutions, and the diffusion of a culture that has created space for armies of pseudoscientists to step into the minds of an increasingly credulous public. ... Matt Hongoltz-Hetling crafts a powerful narrative about just how fragmented our understanding of what is real and what is not has become." <www.tinyurl.com/y4w4xmba> 

   For a discussion with the author, check out "Why Americans Are Turning to the Paranormal—and What That Says About Trust" at <www.tinyurl.com/n8sb5352> "This is a conversation about the difference between healthy skepticism and corrosive doubt—and what rises to replace expertise when the experts no longer hold sway."

And for yet another take, see the author interview at "What Ghost Hunters Tell Us About Trump's America" in New York Magazine, May 28 '25. <www.tinyurl.com/5n7nbevb>

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SOCIALISM

"Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society" ("Uncommon Knowledge" with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution) -- Sowell is a Stanford University Senior Fellow with the Hoover Institution. 

   The following is taken from a December 16, 2009 video interview <www.tinyurl.com/56m7vj8d> focusing on Sowell's book Intellectuals and Society. <www.tinyurl.com/56m7vj8d> Host Peter Robinson explains that Sowell "uncovers the truth behind why intellectuals are obsessed with socialism. Drawing on Sowell's extensive research, we explore the underlying motives and ideological forces that drive elites in academia, media, and politics to champion socialist ideals, despite their repeated failures throughout history. Why do these influential figures persist in advocating for a system that harms those it claims to help?"

   Robinson: "You refer to 'intellectuals in society.' Whom do you mean?" 

   Sowell: "I mean people whose end products are ideas."

   Robinson: "A research scientist is not necessarily an intellectual?"

   Sowell: "That's right."

   Robinson: "An engineer isn't necessarily an intellectual?"

   Sowell: "That's right, because the engineer is judged by the end product, which is not simply ideas. ... Conversely, if an intellectual who's brilliant has an idea for rearranging society and that ends in disaster, he pays no price at all. ...

   Robinson: "Let me quote Intellectuals ans Society: 'The fatal misstep of intellectuals is assuming that superior ability within a particular realm can be generalized to superior wisdom or morality overall. Chess grandmasters, musical prodigies, and others who are as remarkable within their respective specialties as intellectuals within theirs seldom make that mistake.' Why? Let's take an example, Noam Chomsky, whom you write about and his technical work within his discipline of linguistics, where it considers him one of the great figures of the 20th century, and his work in politics...."

   Sowell: "An absurdity. The same could be said of Bertrand Russell and his landmark works on mathematics.... When you step outside your level of specialty, sometimes that's like stepping off a cliff. And why is it that intellectuals, that is to say people whose end product is ideas, should succumb to that temptation? ... 

   "Again, I'm quoting from Intellectuals in Society. 'It is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge.' ...

   Sowell: "Yes. They believe that, since knowledge is concentrated in people like themselves, what needs to be done is - in the quote from President Obama - to put more power in the hands of the experts."

   Robinson: "So the intellectual temptation is to say, 'Look we already know everything?'"

   Sowell: "That's right. If only we also had the power, everything would be just fine. ...

   "I argue that they probably don't know 1% of the consequential knowledge in a society. Consequential knowledge is a concept that runs through this book."

   Robinson: "Explain that concept."

   Sowell: "Knowledge whose presence or absence has consequences. ... You can put together quite a large group of professors and they're still not going to possess the knowledge that would enable them to run General Motors, for example, or to run the nation's healthcare system for example. ...

   "One of the things that has happened all around the world in the 20th century was that all sorts of countries have tried central planning. Now, the guys who run the central plan usually have advanced degrees from prestigious institutions. They have mountains of statistics sitting there, and they have all the experts in the country at their beck and call, and yet when you take the power out of their hands and return it to the market, then all the hundreds of millions of people who don't have any of those things usually end up with a higher rate of growth and a more rapid decline in poverty."

   Robinson: "Because consequential knowledge, by its nature, tends to be widely diffused."

   Sowell: "Yes. Overcoming adversity is one of our great desires, and one of our great sources of pride. But it is something that our anointed deep thinkers strive to eliminate from our lives through everything from great inflation to the welfare state. The anointed want to eliminate stress, challenge, striving and competition. They want the necessities of life to be supplied as rights. ... Nothing is to be earned. ... This is a vision of human beings as livestock to be fed by the government and herded and tended by the anointed. All the things that make us human beings are to be removed from our lives, and we are to live as denatured creatures controlled and directed by our betters. Those things that help human beings be independent and self-reliant - whether automobiles, guns, the free market, or vouchers - provoke instant hostility from the anointed.

   "Automobiles enable you to come and go as you wish, without so much as a 'by your leave' to your betters. The very idea that other people will go where they want, live where they want [and] how they want, and send their children to whatever schools they choose is galling to the anointed, for it denies the very specialness that is at the heart of their picture of themselves. 

   "Guns are completely inappropriate for the kind of sheeplike people the anointed envision, or the orderly prepackaged world in which they are to live. Think of those people earning whatever incomes they happen to get from producing goods or services for other people at prices resulting from supply and demand, with the anointed cut out of the loop entirely and standing on the sidelines in helpless frustration unable to impose their particular vision of social justice. ...  

   "One of the most dangerous things about the welfare state is that it breaks the connection between what people have produced and what they consume. At least in many people's minds. ... The welfare state makes it possible for individuals to think of money or goods as just arbitrary dispensations. Thus, those who have less can feel a grievance against society and are less inhibited about stealing or vandalizing. And the very concept of gratitude or obligation disappears. ... 

   "Intellectuals have seen themselves not simply as an elite in the passive sense, in which large landowners, rentiers, or holders of various sinecures might qualify as elites, but as an anointed elite people with a mission to lead others in one way or another toward better lives. ... The ills of society have been seen as ultimately an intellectual and moral problem, for which intellectuals are especially equipped to provide answers by virtue of their greater knowledge and insight, as well as their not having vested economic interests to bias them in favor of the existing order and still the voice of conscience. Large, unmerited differences in the economic and social prospects of people born into different social circumstances have long been a central theme of intellectuals with the vision of the anointed. ... The psychic problems created by moral stigma as well as the horrors of war, for example, are also things for which intellectual solutions are sought." <www.tinyurl.com/2n68b9kj>

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TOTALITARIANISM

As the natural fruit of socialism, the global catastrophes wrought by totalitarianism have received little attention compared with the vast human suffering they've caused. If ever there was a subject in which humanity fails to learn from the examples of the past, this would seem to be it. 

   In "To Lie or Not to Lie" (Fusion, May 8 '25), Juliana Geran Pilon reviews The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now <www.tinyurl.com/3jzw7nsc> and finds it "a breath of fresh air."

   "In concise, elegant, and eminently readable prose, Daniel J. Mahoney, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and professor emeritus at Assumption University, castigates the enemies of liberty without the overheated vitriol that exacerbates polarization without enlightening. Having had quite enough of violence and anti-American protests on college campuses, tired of being fed a diet of selective news peddled by non-investigative journalists, most people are eager for a voice of moderation and common sense.

   "That is just what the book delivers." <www.tinyurl.com/5xxaxy2k>

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