Wikipedia: A Roadmap to a Catastrophic Future
Wikipedia: A Roadmap to a Catastrophic Future
Richard Gale and Gary Null PhD
Progressive Radio Network, September 9, 2020
During the past 19 years Wikipedia has risen to the admirable status as the world’s most formidable and trusted encyclopedia to educate and inform the public about acceptable and unacceptable medical systems, therapies and interventions. Although there are no accurate figures, there have certainly been billions of searches on Wikipedia about health topics over the years.
However, there is a problem. And it is a very serious and potentially life-threatening problem about relying upon Wikipedia’s content regarding many medical modalities. For example, virtually everything that comes up for searches on Alternative and Complementary Medicine (CAM) is negative and provides an unscientifically founded and derogatory narrative.
Today there are hundreds of thousands of certified physicians and licensed practitioners who have extensive training and clinical experience in a large variety of CAM disciplines such as Chiropractic, Naturopathy, Orthomolecular Medicine, Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine, Homeopathy, Functional Medicine, Holistic Dentistry and Veterinary Science, Therapeutic Massage, Yoga, etc. Moreover, across the span of these therapies, there are millions of peer-reviewed studies that in many cases are largely supportive of the scientific veracity for their safety and efficacy. Therefore, how is it possible that all these doctors and practitioners, many from leading medical schools and hospitals, can all be lumped into a single pool and labeled wrong or delusional? Not only are they cast as being in error but also as villains, quacks and charlatans for offering medical interventions that Wikipedia disingenuously classifies as pseudosciences. So what might be the motivation behind Wikipedia’s efforts to mischaracterize and defame entire medical practices, most of which are decades if not centuries older than conventional pharmaceutical-based medicine?
For us, the answer is blatantly apparent: to categorically destroy the reputations and growing popularity of these medical systems and their advocates. Yet the arrogance of Wikipedia editors goes beyond simply disparaging CAM practitioners. It is also a condemnation of many millions of patients who have found relief, benefit and even actual cures for illnesses by following non-conventional medical protocols either alone or together with standard orthodox medicine.
When we examine the backgrounds of many of the Wikipedia editors who control CAM entries, we inevitably find individuals who have absolutely no professional experience in the subjects they are condemning. They have no medical degrees or background. They have never conducted clinical trials or ever treated a patient. They have never published anything in a notable peer-reviewed medical publication or journal. But worse, they remain completely anonymous by concealing their real identities, aside from whatever backgrounds they reveal on their personal Wikipedia pages or their little “badges” they display for their years of volunteering to compose and edit. What they share in common is a resounding and fanatical belief in modern Skepticism.
Over the years, organizations associated with the movement known as Skepticism, a dogmatic scientific materialism that can trace its origins back to the mid-19th century, have discovered that Wikipedia’s lack of organizational oversight and control over the encyclopedia’s content has made it an ideal platform to promulgate the Skeptic ideology and to discredit medical, psychological and scientific areas of research it disagrees with. It is not uncommon to discover that for any given entry dealing with a particular CAM therapy or a biography of one of its advocates, Skeptic editors monitor and far outnumber honest editors without conflicts of interest who struggle to keep the pages neutral, unbiased and free of defamatory language.
The French philosopher, radical atheist and father of Positivism, August Comte (d. 1857) can be properly identified as the architect for the scientific materialism that modern Skeptics embrace. “Science is our only source of genuine knowledge about the world.” Comte wrote, “It is the only way to understand humanity’s place in the world. And science provides the only credible view of the world as a whole.” We have likely heard this kind of argument many times before. It is called religious fundamentalism, a subjective belief that is framed in a mentally contrived conception of false absolutes and a primitive logic based upon fear and only seeing the world in terms of black and white, good and evil. There are many serious, and potentially catastrophic consequences to this dogma. Nevertheless it is the indispensable premise upon which Skepticism bases its vehement assault on CAM therapies. The tragedy is Skepticism constructs a view of life that is intrinsically amoral. There can be no incentive to act ethically, nor develop humanist values that provide life with meaning and purpose if the only thing that exists is atoms, molecules, and neural activity to account for the thoughts, creativity and feelings of human beings. The problem is that there is not a single study that provides unquestionable evidence to support a view of life reduced to only matter. Nor has it reached any consensus within the scientific community. Therefore, for the militant Skeptic, we are nothing more than computers, the mind and consciousness is an illusion. One very popular celebrity Skeptic is the philosopher of mind John Searle at the University of California at Berkeley. He writes,
“There is a simple solution to the mind-body problem. [we should all be relieved it is simple]. This solution has been available to any educated person since serious work began on the brain nearly a century ago, and in a sense, we all know it to be true. Here it is: Mental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain.”
Yet, here lies one of Skeptic’s hypocrisies; that is, by their own argument, their belief in scientism’s ultimate truth is nothing more than a mental illusion itself. More dangerous, this is a doctrinal belief that confirms that there is no need for ethical behavior and the cultivation of higher values if we are nothing more than a brain composed of fat, protein, water and electrical currents.
This is the underlying belief motivating Wikipedia’s Skeptic editors. It is the incentive behind their mission to eradicate many alternative health practices which either deviate or are contrary to this 19th century determinist belief on Wikipedia.
Like a kennel of Palov’s dogs, the most devoted Wikipedia editors who spend hours upon hours daily composing and editing entries are conditioned by the bells and whistles to receive rewards that have been created by its co-founder Jimmy Wales. Skeptic editors vie for accumulating rewards for the number of entries composed, the number of edits, and for deliberating in editorial conflicts. In return, editors receive more administrative authority and special privileges to make final rulings on controversial content. Skeptics have excelled in gaming this decrepit Skinnerian reward system and consequently possess administrative control over a minimum of a thousand entries. With the full support of Jimmy Wales, who embraces the catastrophic Skeptic philosophy, these editors are capable of holding non-conventional medical disciplines and its practitioners in a perpetual Wikipedia gulag.
Fortunately, there is now a growing number of voices turning away from Wikipedia and condemning its Skeptic orientation. We have heard back from department chairs at university medical schools, many professors, a Nobel Prize laureate, presidents of associations, editors of many medical and health journals, and to physicians and licensed practitioners from all forms of medical practice, including the dental and veterinary sciences, and former Wikipedia editors, who have walked away from Wikipedia and who refuse to assist in its funding.
In our opinion, Skeptic editors represent a modern day scientific cult, using the encyclopedia as a psychological death squad, a Robespierrian guillotine court without due process, to silence complementary and alternative medicine. It is a modern day hate group of Alt-Science. Real evidence-based medicine means nothing to them. Rather, it is a psychopathological effort to raise Skeptic dogma as the ultimate inquisitional court of a medical orthodoxy aligned with the drug-based pharmaceutical paradigm.
Skepticism and its humanitarian threats to health and genuine well-being needs to be more thoroughly understood by Wikipedia users and society at large. More scholars, journalists, citizens need to be taking it to task and deconstructing the fallacies behind its foundational principles. To permit Skepticism to increase its influence on the internet and university campuses will be catastrophic, a nihilistic recipe for disaster, and will condemn future generations to come with the despair of psychological illnesses because in a Skeptic world there is no meaning or purpose in life. Sadly, this is already coming to pass.
