I'm interested in the following disciplines:
A collection of theories, some useful, most problematic, theories motivated mainly by vested interests, unable to explain the evidence, assuming that the world conforms to the theorist's model of it, asserting that the world is how they claim it to be, not how it really is, as though asserting a theory to be true, makes it true. Our mainstream theories don't seem to contribute very much to human welfare - whether they be concerned with understanding the world, organising the world or feeding the world.
Economics
In economics, the mainstream neoliberal view is that unregulated capitalism is self-optimising. However, the unfettered application of the neoliberal Holy Trinity - deregulation, privatisation and globalisation - over the last three decades has all but brought the world to its knees. Deregulation – by removing all constraints on finance capital and speculation - has created a string of speculative booms and busts each more serious than its predecessor, an on-going series of stock market swings, panics and crashes - including the global financial crisis itself. Privatisation has cannibalised huge swathes of the world’s social and economic infrastructure. And - under the banner of comparative advantage - globalisation has impoverished both the developed and the underdeveloped world in a global race to the bottom.
The driving force behind all these developments is the capitalist corporation. Corporations don’t need or want regulations and controls; they don’t care about industrial safety or the environment. Corporations exist simply to maximise profits, dumping their wastes off onto the rest of society or the environment wherever they can, like cost externalising machines. Today, more than ever, corporations are highly mechanised, automated and mobile. They don’t need skilled workers anymore, instead just cheap, docile workers, easily acquired by relocating to parts of the world with plentiful supplies of cheap labour, to countries with no regulations or controls, to places that don’t care about decent living standards, industrial safety or the environment.
For three decades, neoliberal governments have encouraged globalisation, breaking down all barriers to the free flow of international capital, elevating so called free trade over fair trade, impoverishing workers everywhere, deskilling, casualising and relocating jobs, undermining trade union power, eroding progressive social and economic reforms which took many decades of struggle and sacrifice to achieve, delivering nothing more than a global race to the bottom. Workers in the third world haven’t fared any better either, with one low wage area being played off against another. And now, with the global financial crisis, the world is going through the worst market failure since the Great Depression, millions of workers around the world losing their jobs, their homes and their pensions – their very futures.
It seems fairly clear that the only thing that unregulated capitalism optimises is the corporate bottom line, albeit through ever increasing economic catastrophes, destroying wealth like some form of dog-eat-dog social Darwinism, whilst at the same time achieving an ever increasing concentration and accumulation of capital. The surviving Wall Street banks are bigger and stronger than ever, and in four years the Obama administration hasn't succeeded with a single prosecution.
Nutrition
The mainstream view on nutrition is that obesity is caused by too much fatty food and too little exercise. Fatty foods elevate cholesterol and cholesterol causes heart disease. Individuals must achieve a balance between calories in and calories out. This is the mainstream view and there’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Western societies have been lowering their fatty food and cholesterol levels for decades but heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity continue to increase – in some cases reaching epidemic levels. The truth is that calories don’t count – but the type of foods they come from do. Carbohydrates make you fat and being fat is a major risk factor for all the above diseases. Consequently carbohydrates also make you ill.
Climate Change
Again without a shred of evidence, the mainstream view rests on an incoherent concept of global temperature. But temperature is just not the sort of thing that can be averaged. Hence, global temperature doesn't exist except as a meaningless statistic. Nevertheless the mainstream asserts that carbon dioxide is causing runaway global warming - whatever that may be. The real problem is that the global warming faction has hijacked the environmental movement which has traditionally been concerned with improving public amenity including clean air, clean water and open, public spaces; saving natural habitat, ecosystems and forests, and making corporations accountable for their waste. All this has now been rendered subservient to global warming.
But reduced to essentials, global warming boils down to the commodification of carbon - carbon credits turned into commodities and traded in capitalist markets like oil or iron. But all the evidence from Europe shows that carbon trading schemes don't reduce emissions one jot. They do however allow big polluters to carry on as if nothing had happened. The commodification of carbon was invented by Enron. It was successfully marketed by Enron to environmentalists at Kyoto. Enron was destroyed shortly thereafter by its corrupt and incompetent management
Cosmology
The mainstream Big Bang Theory (BBT) unites science and the Bible. According to BBT, the universe began as a single point particle which instantaneously expanded very much faster than the speed of light about thirteen billion years ago. It has been expanding ever since - just as the first millennium theologians theorised. BBT is comparable to the Ptolemaic theory of planetary orbits. The theory can explain the orbits, but only if some very weird planetary movements are allowed, speeding up, slowing down, reversing etc. To 'save the appearances' the Ptolemaic system was rendered ever more complex with the introduction of increasingly intricate epicycles - cycles within cycles. Of course the weirdness came from the fact that the Earth is not at the centre of things. Once Copernicus dared to point this out, and Newton developed his theory of gravity, planetary orbits became really simple, elegant ellipses.
BBT again puts the Earth at the centre of an alleged expanding universe. But, as with Ptolemy, every new anomaly forces BBT to introduce ever increasingly complex explanations to again 'save the appearances'. According to the BBT 98% of the universe is missing. With gravity as the driver, there is just not enough matter in the universe to account for its configuration. BBT therefore invents dark matter and the corresponding dark energy to save the day. Neither of these substances have ever been detected, and it is doubtful whether they even exist. They certainly cannot have any of the properties of ordinary matter. So BBT turned to the physicists for help. Particle physics is now searching for what it calls the God particle - the Higgs Boson. And Stephen Hawking is busily trying to understand the mind of God. The Large Hadron Collider has so far found nothing.
Realism versus Anti-Realism
And, to top it off, anti-realism denies the existence of a mind-independent real world altogether. Social constructivism is one major form of anti-realism which claims that facts, justifications and explanations are all socially constructed. It must be acknowledged that some facts are socially constructed - money is one of them. Clearly money wouldn't exist without society. But fact constructivists claim that all facts are created by society - including facts like rivers and mountains. These facts seemed to exist long before humans. But, according to fact constructivists, they didn't. Human consciousness and language carved these facts from the primeval substance which had no form or structure until human contingent needs and interests intervened and created facts about the world. This strange philosophy is examined in detail in the Realism versus Anti-Realism post.
