Scientific Facism
So much of what we know is built on the shoulders of previous generations, it’s almost a matter of faith that our collective knowledge is always better today than it was yesterday. But it is also a fact that society goes through cycles, manias, and societal structures can bias our knowledge in one way or another.
Take for example anxiety disorders, which accounted for more than a third of the U.S. total mental health costs of $150 billion in 1990. These disorders include phobias, ptsd, and ocd. Treatment today normally consists of techniques to re-train the conditioned response over a long period of time, or chemically blunt the areas of the brain involved in the response. For the past 20 years or so, the practicioners of ?NLP?, an application of gestalt (itself an application of korzybski) have insisted that phobias are simply a bug in the map/territory distinction and can be cured rather quickly by installing new inhibitory responses (e.g. the ?swish pattern?). It is only recently that brain imaging studies have verified what gestalt said all along — that phobia cures can happen very quickly byinstaling aninhibitory reaction up front, and this is the net effect of the more expensive techniques anyway. We are starting to realize that all of the billions spent on ?scientific? remedies tothese ?problems of belief? may have been unnecessary, and there may be much more direct and effective ways to correct these problems. Part of the problem may lie in the resistence of the ?scientific establishment? to examine techniques that are too ?new age?, and part may lie in the fact that quick cures and cures which cannot be patented are money losers. For example, recent studies have shown that Yohimbine accelerates the installation of inhibitory responses for phobias, but further research is focusing on patented chemical analogues (and it’s not at all clear that the chemical augmentation is all that useful or necessary). One imagines that traditional doctors will begin offering ?swish pattern? therapy only when there is a commercial drug available which can justify large insurance bills. Generally the only studies you can find comparing ?scientific? remedies against the traditional and often cheaper alternatives are attempts to prove the alternatives to be dangerous or ineffective.