What is science today, and what is its purpose? Martin Heidegger’s well-known critique was mainly limited to technology, while Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno’s denunciation of Enlightenment reason as a throwback to mythology led only to a critique of capitalist economy and the bourgeois society of the West. These authors do not offer an actual critique of science as such. The Hungarian-British chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) left behind a body of work that is highly influential in the Anglo-Saxon sphere. Only some of his works have been translated into German; his magnum opus Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago, 1958) has not been. The reason is surely that Polanyi does away with a naively ‘modern’ positivist, mechanical conception of knowledge, or rather the doubt about the basic values of Western civilization that springs from it, and restores personal judgement, commitment, and faith as sources of knowledge. This fits poorly into current Western, especially German, public discourse, which is why the call to ‘Follow the science!’ must be questioned in the context of the COVID crisis: ‘Which science?’

The following article consists of two parts: the first deals with different conceptions of science per se (Polanyi and Hermann Schmitz versus Nikolai Bukharin and today’s official ‘COVID science’), the second with the current violation of the methodological requirements for free science (according to Robert Merton) and some resulting contradictions. Unfortunately, the philosophies of Polanyi and Schmitz are largely unknown in continental Europe and can only be hinted at here, but should be useful for understanding today’s threats to free science.

I. 1. Humanized Pure Science Versus Mechanical-Totalitarian ‘Science’

Polanyi argues, among other things, ‘that we can know more than we can tell’.¹ This ‘tacit’ knowledge is not identical to the Freudian‘unconscious’, but can be understood in terms of Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychology assumes the primary wholeness, structuredness, and dynamism of mental conditions; one perceives a greater sense of order, structure, and quality than can result from the arrangement of individual sensations. Pure scientific knowledge remains of paramount importance to Polanyi. ‘Tacit’ knowledge, resulting from the scientist’s engaged participation, merely forms a supplement to it, making cognition more personal, ultimately more human, and giving science a place in an integrated culture of human engagement with reality. In doing so, Polanyi admittedly exposes the Enlightenment ideal of a strictly objective, completely transparent knowledge as an illusion. Science is based not only on what is objectively counted and measured, but also on tradition, authority, unquestioned presuppositions, metaphysical beliefs, and personal choices. This layer of knowledge must be taken into account because it defies known knowledge, which can then be misdirected positivistically and mechanically, developing a totalitarian potential.

Polanyi reports a crucial encounter in his book The Tacit Dimension:

‘I first met questions of philosophy when I came up against the Soviet ideology under Stalin which denied justification to the pursuit of science. I remember a conversation I had with Bukharin in Moscow in 1935. Though he was heading toward his fall and execution three years later, he was still a leading theoretician of the Communist Party. When I asked him about the pursuit of pure science in Soviet Russia, he said that pure science was a morbid symptom of a class society; under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to the problems of the current Five-Year Plan. I was struck by the fact that this denial of the very existence of independent scientific thought came from a socialist theory which derived its enormous persuasive power from its claim for scientific certainty. The scientific outlook appeared to have produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was place for science itself. This conception denied altogether any intrinsic power to thought and thus denied also any ground for claiming freedom of thought.’²

A few years later, the German philosopher Hermann Schmitz saw the cause of this epistemological narrowing (especially in his major work System der Philosophie [System of Philosophy, Bonn, 1964/1980]) in ontological rationalism, which believes that it is, without criticism, possible to extend the claims of rationality to applied methodology and hence to reality. Namely, the rationalist concept of complexity sees complexity in any circumstance with large numbers. But not everything is straightforwardly discrete, and thus numerable. The realistic (and not rationalistic!) view of reality is phenomenological, making us aware of its situational condition. And situations, according to Schmitz, are ‘chaotic manifold wholenesses’,⁴ whose elements are undecided with respect to identity and diversity, and thus are not numerable. That is why they are ‘diffuse within’ (‘binnendiffus’⁵), so that in them not everything is discrete, that is, increasing a quantity by one. Accordingly, reality cannot be completely expressed mathematically. (It is not for nothing that Schmitz also oriented himself to Gestalt psychology.) Situations, in turn, are what the subject constantly encounters in real life experience, but one is not allowed to take these seriously because all facts have to be ‘objective’ for modern science. Schmitz, however, returns to the question regarding the nature of ‘subjective facts’ that ‘at most one, namely the person concerned, […] can state’⁶—no matter how much others know and how well they can speak. Objectivity emerges only after peeling away original subjectivity.

The ‘rationality illusion’ of Nikolai Bukharin, as Hintze⁷ calls the rationalist concept of complexity, consisted in exactly this simplifying ‘rationalism of the matter’ (‘Rationalismus der Sache’⁸), in the mechanical conception of reality, which Schmitz opposes with the phenomena-adequate concept of complexity plus concurrent ‘rationalism of the method’. This is similar to how Polanyi pursued pure science with no ifs or buts, but without wishing to leave ‘tacit’ knowledge unconsidered. In other words, just as it was Polanyi’s intention not to abolish pure science but to make it more human, Schmitz emphasized his intention to make people understand real life and to make their involuntary life experience accessible to them without renouncing scientific purity. The classical conception of impartial, ideologically neutral, open-ended, and objective science is thus retained, but humanized. Its objectivity is conditional and it is only partially transparent, but this can be compensated for by taking into account ‘tacit’ knowledge and avoiding false rationalism.

2. Mechanical-Totalitarian ‘Science’ as a Political Weapon

One might think that the fatal Enlightenment ideal of knowledge as a means to an end has been expressed since the Renaissance in the utilitarian slogan of the Baron of Verulam in his Meditationes sacrae (1597): ‘Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.’ (For knowledge itself is power.) But the English founder of quantitative mechanical induction might not have considered political power, since his concept of power was concerned only with preventing self-deception about the effect in ignorance of the cause. But the way was paved. What Aristotle and scholasticism would still have evaluated as a mere banausic ‘ability’ now became empirically determined ‘knowledge’, and the human being became the servant of its purpose which was purely material and technical. Mankind was thus led away from itself and its freedom. One had then only to be a little more nefarious to take the next step: the hijacking of science as a political weapon, which has taken place since Karl Marx. This was to make the defence of knowledge as an end in itself even more difficult.

In the current COVID crisis, the interests of most medical scientists are directed to the problems at hand (the ‘pandemic’), making it only a matter of applied science; the spontaneity is of a similar kind as mentioned by Bukharin, except that today, private third-party donors stand alongside the state as influencing factors. This one-sidedness is officially justified as an absolute moral imperative; anyone who criticizes or suggests a different direction is classified as morally inferior. One cannot speak of openness to results if, for example, only vaccination and not other therapies are recognized as in principle representing a solution. The direction of the ‘COVID science’ is officially categorized as clearly transparent, because ‘the’ science allegedly gets the better of reality only in a certain, seemingly completely mathematizable way. But this is a ‘rationalism of the matter’, which must necessarily fail (the ‘rationality illusion’). Free science is neutral and open-ended precisely because tradition, authority, unquestioned presuppositions, metaphysical beliefs, and personal choices are allowed to play a role in it.

The subtle, humanizing corrections of the valid ‘modern’ image of science described by Polanyi and Schmitz cannot be accepted by the ruling global forces (Big Tech, Big Pharma, and NGOs, complemented by supranational organizations such as UNO, WHO, IMF, WEF, etc.), which theoretically and ideologically all derive from the Enlightenment, and can best be described as the ‘billionaire socialist’ establishment. The term ‘socialism’ is used in the following in a relatively broad sense, encompassing ‘leftist’ movements like social democracy, socialism, communism, the New Left, postmodernism, transhumanism, etc., since its goals are determined not by divergent theoretical statements but by quite homogeneous actions (see last paragraph). Furthermore, ‘socialism’ is the main ideological movement which derives itself from the Enlightenment. The other one, ‘liberalism’, can be added today as a potentially totalitarian partner to socialism, as scholars such as Jonah Goldberg⁹ and Ryszard Legutko¹⁰ have demonstrated.

The first reason for this is that science is still for them, even more so, a means to an end than it was for Francis Bacon and the Enlightenment thinkers. With their view of science, to repeat Polanyi, they in fact reject this fundamental value of Western civilization (free science) just as they reject open and creative thinking or freedom of thought. They hold on in a vulgar way to the outdated Enlightenment ideal of strictly objective, completely transparent knowledge because they recognize only known (but not also ‘tacit’) knowledge and have thus fallen for the ‘rationalism of the matter’ with a truncated concept of objectivity. That the situatedness and contextuality of knowledge claimed by today’s postmodern and leftist theorists is only what they say, but not what they believe in, can be easily recognized by the fact that they by no means acknowledge all positions, i.e. also the ‘differently situated’ ones, but stick to the chimera of a strictly objective science, the verdict of which, however, only they possess. One could recognize in this a Gnostic component of ‘billionaire socialism’, with the global elites as the enlightened. Like Bukharin, they claim to know what course history will take (keywords are ‘progress’ and‘ emancipation’), because for them science is not open-ended, but has necessary goals, and they wish to influence history through science in their own sense. Therefore they politicize science.

Ulrich Hintze has shown the precarious consequences of this fusing of politics and science in his Theoria Politica Generalis, a still little known future classic of political science:

‘Everything can be politicized, just as everything is capable to be treated as science. Science is politicizable and politics is capable to be treated scientifically. But science of politics is not itself politics, just as political science ceases to be science. In science, politics finds its counter-image and one could say that politics is what is not science’.¹¹

The second reason is that the global ‘billionaire-socialist’ players are not at all concerned with cognition or truth. One must first realize this. For at first, like Polanyi, one is simply ‘struck’ in the face by this fact. The German philosopher Daniel von Wachter writes in an article about the motives for this:

‘That the basic motive of socialism is not a theory was pointed out by Marx himself in a much-cited sentence [eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach (1845); A. K.]: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” One has only to read this sentence carefully and observe the socialists, then one understands socialism. The theories put forward, such as Marxism–Leninism, do not serve the search for truth at all, but they serve to change the world in a certain way.’¹³

This is admitted surprisingly often even today, just as Bukharin did in 1935, because it is apparently believed that a politicized concept of science still has something to do with real science. This belief has nothing to do with Joseph Stalin and his alleged deviation from the true socialist course of events, as the detractors might claim, but is genuinely ‘leftist’. The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution. As an example of a politicized and ideologized (pseudo)science of today, in an era of almost unchecked global ideological domination by the New Left and the ‘billionaire socialists’, let us take medicine under the sign of the so-called ‘COVID crisis’ since the end of 2019.

II. 1. The Politicized Medical ‘Science’ in the Covid

For this, after discussing the different views of science, the ‘rationalism of method’ will now be addressed. In an essay in The Tablet magazine, one of the world’s leading epidemiologists, the American John P. A. Ioannidis, reflected on the damage done to the norms of scientific research as politics corrupted them during the pandemic. I concentrate on his brilliant essay by mainly commenting it. The specific norms Ioannidis refers to are ‘the Mertonian

norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized scepticism’.¹⁴ With this, the American philosopher Edward Feser summarizes in his review of Ioannidis’s article, referring ‘to an influential account of scientific method proposed by the sociologist Robert Merton.¹⁵ Science should be communal in the sense that research ought to be communicated to and shared with all scientists. It should be universal in the sense of being judged by objective and impersonal criteria. It should be disinterested in the sense that research should be pursued for its own sake rather than for promoting some political agenda or personal aggrandizement. It should be sceptical in the sense that scientists should make testable claims and welcome critical evaluations of their research.’¹⁶

It is evident that these criteria of the scientific method in sum also oppose an absolutization of science. Merton had in mind, as a chilling example, the hijacking of science by non-Marxist national socialism in 1942. How could it come to this again in our day?

‘The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.’¹⁷

And since this is a predominantly medical issue, the term ‘science’ here refers to medicine and its sub- and auxiliary disciplines of virology, epidemiology, pharmacology, etc.

Quite correctly, Ioannidis states that science has been appropriated by politics for purposes it absolutely cannot fulfil. As under Stalin, science is again supposed to be guided by political diktats, then a Five-year Plan that did not work, today vaccination card-based surveillance of all people’s movements for the purpose of authoritarian public health that is never achievable. The reason for this is the fact that, for example, a policy oriented solely towards a pandemic neglects all other diseases, even those that have far worse consequences for ‘public health’. (Hence, the new German greeting, ‘Stay healthy!’ which ignores all other diseases except COVID-19, as if everyone were already healthy just by not having that one disease.) Neither can a constantly changing virus be eradicated (‘zero-COVID’). A mania for the domination of nature has prevailed again, as it is typical in all forms of socialism. Quite obviously, the ‘rationalism of the matter’ described above prevails again at present, which displaces the principles of the ‘rationality of the method’ that actually have to be observed and thus comes to an ‘irrationalism of the method’, ‘which pretends to build where the ground consists of clouds’.¹⁸ Furthermore, the re-established dichotomy of ‘good’ (lockdown, vaccination with experimental modes of action) and ‘evil’ (insistence on fundamental rights, vaccination with classical modes of action, outpatient drug treatment) is striking and has led to a moralizing and thus completely unscientific view of the problem with the absolute rejection of the ‘evil’ positions.

The scientific ideals of impartiality, ideological neutrality, openness to results, and objectivity are thus rejected on moral grounds, among others. Polanyi’s astonishment at an ‘intense moral conscience’ that sought to achieve ‘universal justice’ is appropriate again today. That vaccination is sought as the sole solution to the COVID crisis on the basis of a search for a solution using ‘scientific scepticism’ is equally disingenuous: theorists coming from the Enlightenment, such as Bukharin, or today’s practitioners, such as the governmental ‘COVID scientists’, pass off ‘reason as the only real thing (Hegel) or the always best thing (Plato)’,¹⁹ from which results the totalitarian optimism of trust in the ‘material necessity’ (Alternativlosigkeit) of the desired goals, which characterizes them, which precisely does not align with genuine scientific scepticism. In the case of the COVID pandemic, it is the obvious fact that all measures from the very beginning were aimed at vaccinating as many people as possible, as members of the global Big Tech elite had demanded even before, at the latest at the beginning of the pandemic,²⁰ without even considering alternative solutions such as outpatient therapy or the ‘Swedish way’. They alone know what is good; they know in particular what is good for everyone else; they enforce what they believe is good on everyone else, even using violence. This destructive attitude, humanistic in the worst sense, reveals which political direction the proponents serve, regardless of their personal wealth, namely the left. Unfortunately, nominally liberal and conservative parties have also adopted this attitude.

The principle of communalism has been violated, according to Ioannidis: ‘The retraction of a highly visible hydroxychloroquine paper from the The Lancet was a startling example: A lack of sharing and openness allowed a top medical journal to publish an article in which 671 hospitals allegedly contributed data that did not exist, and no one noticed this outright fabrication before publication. […] The hottest public scientific debate of the moment—whether the COVID-19 virus was the product of natural evolution or a laboratory accident—could have been settled easily with a minimal demonstration of communalism […] from China: Opening the lab books of the Wuhan Institute of Virology would have alleviated concerns immediately.’²¹

Among the questionable methods that failure to share has allowed to be established as rationales for policy decisions is the PCR test, which is inappropriate as an assessment for a COVID ‘case’ because it also measures clinically irrelevant viral load and involves completely healthy individuals, and completely useless incidences, which would be useful only in a representative test population. Universalism was violated:

‘The pandemic led seemingly overnight to a scary new form of scientific universalism. Everyone did COVID-19 science or commented on it. […] At first sight, this was an unprecedented mobilization of interdisciplinary talent. However, most of this work was of low quality, often wrong, and sometimes highly misleading. Many people without subject-matter technical expertise became experts overnight, emphatically saving the world. As these spurious experts multiplied, evidence-based approaches—like randomized trials and collection of more accurate, unbiased data—were frequently dismissed as inappropriate, too slow, and harmful. The disdain for reliable study designs was even celebrated. […] Alongside thousands of solid scientists came freshly minted experts with questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent credentials and questionable, irrelevant, or nonexistent data. Social and mainstream media have helped to manufacture this new breed of experts. Anyone who was not an epidemiologist or health policy specialist could suddenly be cited as an epidemiologist or health policy specialist by reporters who often knew little about those fields but knew immediately which opinions were true. Conversely, some of the best epidemiologists and health policy specialists in America were smeared as clueless and dangerous by people who believed themselves fit to summarily arbitrate differences of scientific opinion without understanding the methodology or data at issue.’²²

The last sentence of the quote alludes to the so-called fact-checkers, most of whom are technically incompetent journalists. The role of the media in general has been shameful, and they routinely simplify scientific statements. What people know, therefore, is not what scientists have actually said, but rather what politicians and journalists have claimed about what ‘science’ says. We are constantly told to ‘follow the science,’ but what we get to hear is not science itself, but science as reflected in the distorting mirror of the modern media. Some content just resists simplistic popularization, which, if a scientific opinion is exclusively favoured, takes on a propagandistic flavour.

‘Disinterestedness suffered gravely’, Ioannidis writes. ‘In the past, conflicted entities mostly tried to hide their agendas. During the pandemic, these same conflicted entities were raised to the status of heroes. For example, Big Pharma companies clearly produced useful drugs, vaccines, and other interventions that saved lives, though it was also known that profit was and is their main motive.’²³

‘Yet during the pandemic, requesting better evidence on effectiveness and adverse events was often considered anathema. […] Other potentially conflicted entities became the new societal regulators, rather than the ones being regulated. Big Tech companies, which gained trillions of dollars in cumulative market value from the virtual transformation of human life during lockdown, developed powerful censorship machineries that skewed the information available to users on their platforms. Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted.’²⁴

Thus, we see the suppression or concealment of scientific results that do not conform to official government policy. Most people are unable to find, read, and correctly interpret the original scientific publications. Their opinions, therefore, are unfortunately based simply on what the modern media puts in front of them, or what has been allowed to be placed in front of them. The German Network Enforcement Act, which cedes censorship measures to private companies even for information on COVID-19, is a striking example. Another is the fact that a leading German newspaper was allowed to call a renowned philosopher of science, a member of the Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Science, an ‘instinctless defiler of nests’ (‘Nestbeschmutzer’) without argument,²⁵ because he, unlike his colleagues, reminded them during lockdowns of the non-negotiability of fundamental rights and proportionality as a prerequisite for coercive state measures.

‘Organized scepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science—and science lost,’ notes Ioannidis, who adds: ‘Honest, continuous questioning and exploration of alternative paths are indispensable for good science. In the authoritarian (as opposed to participatory) version of public health, these activities were seen as treason and desertion. The dominant narrative became that “we are at war”. When at war, everyone has to follow orders. If a platoon is ordered to go right and some soldiers explore manoeuvring to the left, they are shot as deserters. Scientific scepticism had to be shot, no questions asked. The orders were clear.’²⁶

As Ioannidis summarizes: ‘Politics had a deleterious influence on pandemic science. Anything any apolitical scientist said or wrote could be weaponized for political agendas. Tying public health interventions like masks and vaccines to a faction, political or otherwise, satisfies those devoted to that faction, but infuriates the opposing faction. This process undermines the wider adoption required for such interventions to be effective. Politics dressed up as public health not only injured science. It also shot down participatory public health where people are empowered, rather than obligated and humiliated. A scientist cannot and should not try to change his or her data and inferences based on the current doctrine of political parties or the reading du jour of the social media thermometer. […] Data, sentences, and interpretations are taken out of context and weaponized. The same apolitical scientist could be attacked by left-wing commentators in one place and by alt-right commentators in another. Many excellent scientists have had to silence themselves in this chaos. Their self-censorship has been a major loss for scientific investigation and the public health effort. […] I worry that science and its norms have shared the fate of the disadvantaged. It is a pity, because science can still help everyone. Science remains the best thing that can happen to humans, provided it can be both tolerant and tolerated.’²⁷

2. Exposing Contradictions in the Prevailing View of Science

Particularly illuminating is the glaring contradiction that exists between the current insistence on abstract rationality, or a supposedly scientifically grounded absolute truth, and the pronouncements uttered by today’s postmodern philosophy of science on every other occasion (except possibly in the field of climate change), which can be summarized as follows, quoted here from the multiply reprinted volume Methoden der empirischen Sozialforschung (Methods of Empirical Social Research):

‘Every aspect of the enterprise “science” can only be understood through its local and cultural context; even laws of nature are social constructions; scientific theories are “texts” or “stories” on an equal footing with others; since supposed facts do not allow unambiguous statements about scientific results, the truth of propositions cannot be decided within “science”; since there can be no objective science, it is all the more important to include explicit goals of “emancipatory science” in the process of scientific research.’²⁸

Barely concealed behind these so-called ‘postmodern approaches’ is the mechanical- totalitarian view of science as a means to an end (the goals of ‘emancipatory science’ described above). By the time the Soviet Union fell, thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault had responded to the repudiation of Marxist teleological ideology with a tactical 180-degree turn: instead of an open teleology, they now asserted relativism (‘there can be no objective science’). The old mechanical scientificity was thus apparently made more flexible, but not in the sense of Polanyi or Schmitzen, who retained valid scientific norms and precisely did not arrive at postmodern relativism: the rationalism of the method must of course be retained in science, and science can of course be objective. By defining the goals of emancipation, the socialists hang on to their known mechanical, and teleological conception of history.

Nothing could be more wrong than to see relativism in the quite critical corrections to the ‘modern’ view of science put forward by Polanyi and Schmitz. For the claim to truth is maintained. Not so with postmodernism, ‘which shouts, “There is no truth!” or “Truth is an instrument of domination!” The utterances of postmodernists do not serve the search for truth, but the socialist transformation of the world.’²⁹ The contradiction between denouncing truth as an instrument of power and claiming ‘truth’ for oneself in order to assert one’s own political positions is typical of socialists. It is a purely functional understanding of scientific truth that serves the attainment and maintenance of power. The postmodern denial of truly objective, i.e. free and pure, science is nothing other than the return of Marx’s ‘class standpoint’ (‘being determines consciousness’), only this time the talk is of the ‘local and cultural context’. The ‘truth of propositions’ is decided today not by conformity to the ‘problems of the current Five-year Plan’, but by the extent of the promotion of human ‘fraternization’, recognizable by the supposedly ‘egalitarian’ content of a general ‘public health’, in the case of the COVID crisis. That is, the political enforcement of vaccination for 100 per cent of the population. Only the vaccinated and supervised can be legally equal and in full possession of human and civil rights, which, like all the goals of the socialists, is touted as ‘progressive’, but in reality is, of course, an authoritarian imposition. But politicized science is, in any case, no longer science. Basically, therefore, nothing has changed among the socialists with respect to the positivist and mechanistic conception of science. Also, the materialistic teleology has only been replaced by a moralistic teleology and epistemological relativism ends without any criticism of socialist political measures, which have meanwhile become the totalitarian means by which the state exerts its power.

There is another interesting contradiction in socialists’ thought, in the context of their ‘scientific’ concept of so-called diversity, in which minorities, who are supposedly just as disadvantaged, discriminated against, and marginalized as women, are to be politically promoted. Specifically, this means that certain groups, such as lesbians, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people, ‘people of colour’, migrants, indigenous people and colonized people, are to be positively discriminated against in law. In addition, there are ‘postmigrants’, meaning the descendants of migrants. Again, the (supposedly moral) principle has remained the same: the ‘invocation of goodness, justice, and grievance, especially with the claim that one group is oppressed by another’.³⁰ However, it was easy to instigate the unrestrained media agitation against and criminalization of the unvaccinated minority, and this has showed the real reason for diversity politics: the pure drive for power, in which minorities are merely the useful idiots. The socialists are not at all concerned with minority protection as such. If a minority cannot be instrumentalized, it can obviously be suppressed. The recent statement of a socialist German health minister that no one would go to jail for refusing to be treated with certain vaccines was significant. Presumably we ought to feel gratitude for this. The people concerned will merely be ruined financially and socially.

3. THE GOALS OF SOCIALISM ARE ALSO TO BE ATTAINED BY MEANS OF POLITICIZED ‘SCIENCE’

The true goals of socialism which the ‘billionaire socialists’, new leftists, and their helpers are attempting to reach, as evidenced by the regular actions taken in all the more than 60 socialist takeovers of power so far, and therefore empirically proven, are the following: ‘the seizure of political power and the establishment of a party dictatorship; the suppression or killing of opponents; expropriation, in whole or in part through progressive taxes, levies, and inheritance taxes; planned economy or regulation of the economy; abolition or restriction of freedom of contract; extensive interference in private life; state education and restriction of private education’.³¹ The politicization of medical science in the context of the COVID crisis (and also of the sciences as a whole) is another building block in the construction of a socialist system that will enable even more effective surveillance and repression due to digitalization, in the form of a ‘cybernetic socialism’.³²

NOTES

1 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, [1966] 2009), 4. 

2 Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 3–4.

3 Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 4.

4 Hermann Schmitz, Kurze Einführung in die Neue Phänomenologie, 4. Aufl. (Freiburg und München: Alber, 2014), 47 ff.

5 Schmitz, Kurze Einführung, 47.

6 Schmitz, Kurze Einführung, 31.

7 Ulrich Hintze, Theoria Politica Generalis (Bad Schussenried: Gerhard Hess-Verlag, 2018), 99 ff.

8 Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie, Fünfter Band: Die Aufhebung der Gegenwart (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980), 202.

9 Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

10 Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (New York: Encounter Books, 2016).

11 Hintze, Theoria Politica Generalis, 231.

12 Hintze, Theoria Politica Generalis, 232.

13 Daniel von Wachter, ‘Zerstörung des Wahren, Guten und Schönen: Analyse eines destruktiven Modells’, eigentümlich frei Nr. 191 (April 2019), 27.

14 John P. A. Ioannidis, ‘How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science’, 2021, www. tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/pandemic- science, accessed 13 January 2022.

15 Robert K. Merton, The Normative Structure of Science (1942) (panarchy.org).

16 Edward Feser, ‘Ioannidis on the politicization of science’, 2021, http://edwardfeser.blogspot. com/2021/09/ioannidis-on-politicization-of-science. html, accessed 13 January 2022.

17 Ioannidis, ‘How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science’.

18 Schmitz, System der Philosophie, 202.

19 Schmitz, System der Philosophie, 202.

20 Bill Gates, ‘Bill Gates warned of a deadly pandemic for years — and said we wouldn’t be ready to handle it’, CBS News (19 March 2020), www.cbsnews.com/ news/coronavirus-bill-gates-epidemic-warning- readiness/, accessed 13 January 2022.

21 Ioannidis, ‘How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science’.

22 Ioannidis, ‘How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science’.

23 Ioannidis, ‘How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science’.

24 Ioannidis, ‘How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science’.

25 Joachim Müller-Jung, ‘Nestbeschmutzer in der Nationalakademie’, FAZ (11 May 2021), www.google.de/amp/s/m.faz.net/aktuell/wissen/ der-querdenker-und-nestbeschmutzer-in-der- nationalakademie-17335955.amp.html, accessed 13 January 2022.

26 Ioannidis, ‘How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science’.

27 Ioannidis, ‘How the Pandemic Is Changing the Norms of Science’.

28 Rainer Schnell, Paul Hill, and Elke Esser (Hrsg.), Methoden der empirischen Sozialforschung, 9. Aufl. (München: Oldenbourg, 2011).

29 Daniel von Wachter, ‘Zerstörung des Wahren, Guten und Schönen, 27.

30 Von Wachter, ‘Was ist das Grundmotiv der Achtundsechziger?’, Lecture in Komárom, Hungary, 10 May 2019, fourteen page lecture manuscript, 1. 

31 Von Wachter, ‘Was ist das Grundmotiv der Achtundsechziger?’.

32 Thor Kunkel (2021), ‘Der Weg der Maschine: Annäherungen an den kybernetischen Sozialismus’, Riskante Essays (Dresden: Edition Buchhaus Loschwitz, 2021), 9–86.