“Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying ‘there are only facts,’ I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
There are many layers to today’s subject, so I beg your patience.
What is a fact? And when facts are established, why do they have no impact?
I dwell on this from time to time, most recently when a video of biochemist Kary Mullis resurfaced. Mullis won the 1993 Nobel Prize for inventing PCR — polymerase chain reaction — which may be familiar to you from the recent health panic. PCR was used as the primary test for COVID in the first two years of the so-called pandemic. Then, in December of 2021, it was quietly retired. The reason, according to USA Today, was “because the demand for it has decreased with the authorization of other diagnostic tests.”
That statement misses an important fact: PCR never was, and is not, capable of being a diagnostic test. That’s right. PCR does not and cannot diagnose disease. Says who? Its inventor.
Note the middle video above. (Its owner does not allow it to be seen on this page, but click “Watch on YouTube” to see it.) In it, Mullis carefully answers a question about the “misuse” of PCR as a diagnostic tool. (This was years before COVID.) Mullis points out that the mistake is one of misinterpretation, which is as precise a description as might be imagined. He describes PCR as a method of multiplying DNA samples. If even one molecule of something exists in a human body, the PCR can produce from it almost countless copies of that molecule. That’s all it does. Even the Wikipedia article on PCR is clear on that alone being its ability: “The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is a method widely used to make millions to billions of copies of a specific DNA sample rapidly, allowing scientists to amplify a very small sample of DNA (or a part of it) sufficiently to enable detailed study.”
So when PCR is applied to, say, a single virus until it multiplies into millions of molecules, then the appearance is created of the subject being ravaged by the virus. Voila! The subject appears to be sick!
In other words, for two years, people were labelled as being ill with a certain disease after being given a “test” that was not only not a test, but a means of indicating the presence of the disease when in fact it wasn’t present.
This latter statement is a fact, and the weird thing about facts is that people think they can be proven, like a mathematical equation can be proven. They cannot. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Nietzsche’s famous observation above is frequently shortened and distorted to mean that facts do not exist. He didn't say that. He said that when you “stop before phenomena” — when you perceive entities — you must interpret what you see.* There are no facts at the instant of perception, no facts just “out there,” as philosophers of the positivist school would say. What is present at the moment of engaging with phenomena is the result of interaction between the phenomena and their interpreter. That doesn’t mean that every interaction/interpretation is as legitimate as any other. There can be misinterpretations as well as valid interpretations — falsehoods as well as facts. The proper interpretation of the PCR — the fact about it, as clearly stated by its inventor — is that it never was and cannot be a diagnostic tool. For a rational human, the argument ends there, and the only reasonable conclusion is:
There is no evidence for a COVID pandemic having taken place in the years 2020-21. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a virus, it doesn’t mean that people didn’t get sick, and it doesn’t mean that nobody died from the virus. But it does mean that the numbers of sick cannot possibly have reached the levels of pandemic, given that millions of people were supposedly diagnosed with COVID after undergoing a “test” that was not really a test. Evidence of a pandemic would take the form of positive tests for the virus and, as we have just demonstrated, the so-called “PCR test” given to suspected COVID victims was not a test.
What perplexes me to the point of losing sleep is:
Why is this not loudly shouted by the senators who have grilled Fauci on almost every other point but this? Why is this issue not widely known and discussed? I invite readers to pull down my argument if possible, and to offer objections to my conclusion, but if my argument is sound — and to summarize, it consists of pointing out that the PCR administered as a test during the years 2020-2021 was not a test (as insisted by its inventor, no less) thus eliminating the PCR-supplied numbers cited by the CDC in justifying the COVID “pandemic” — then this fact should be enough to cause all reasonable people to conclude that we were gaslighted by Fauci and his cronies, that there was no pandemic, and that Fauci very likely belongs in prison. Why is this not the case?
My own answer to the puzzlement is simple: Facts as valid interpretations currently enjoy no special status in contrast with “facts” as invalid interpretations. All interpretations are equal; therefore, a fact, in current understanding, is simply that which aligns with whatever interpretation one prefers.
Take a moment to think about that.
“Interpretation” has itself been misinterpreted to enable a given subject to say anything the subject wishes without fear of being contradicted, to bend an interpretation any which way a subject wants it to bend, thus lending whatever conclusion he chooses the character of a fact. The philosophical name for this misinterpretation is subjectivism. Subjectivism does not admit of valid interpretations vs. mis-interpretations. All are equal. I may interpret Mullis to mean that the PCR is not a test. But someone else may interpret him to mean that it might be construed as a test under certain circumstances. The latter has no ground on which to make this claim, but it doesn’t matter: interpretations for the subjectivist need no defense. All are automatically valid, because none of them can be “proven.”
Please allow a short but meaningful detour into the recent philosophical past:
The Enlightenment gave us many good things, but it gave us one very cancerous thing that is today metastasizing at record speed: The idea that if you can’t prove your position, then it is no better than any other position. And by “proof,” the Enlightenment crowd meant deductive proof only. If you can’t assert a position with mathematical certainty, then it is no better than the contrary position. Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, said that the people walking down the street under his window might be automatons for all he knew, thus beginning the practice of modern subjectivism. Hey, you can’t prove that those figures are really people and not automatons, can you? The pinnacle of this nonsense was David Hume who said that, since it cannot be proven the sun will come up tomorrow, it is irrational to assume that it will; one might as well believe that it won’t.
Bring it down to the present. You can’t prove with mathematical certainty that men and women are different (the case is purely empirical) so the belief that they are the same is just as valid — more so, actually, because it balances the “prejudice” that has existed over the centuries that they are different. You can’t prove with mathematical certainty that socialist economies invariably fail. That may have been the case so far, but just as Hume rejected the certainty of tomorrow’s sunrise, it is not certain that the next socialist economy won’t flourish beyond all imagining. Likewise, you can’t prove with mathematical certainty that Kary Mullis was right about PCR. Perhaps it contained potential that he, as its inventor, somehow didn't see, but that the physicians who employed it as a test for COVID discovered despite him. After all, Mullis wasn't around when the pandemic hit. He’d died just a few months earlier.
Still, this leaves us unsatisfied. If all interpretations are on the table, what makes millions of people choose the ones that in more philosophically attuned times would be labeled invalid? Why is a large chunk of today’s society inclined to think it’s perfectly okay to allow doctors to remove underage boys’ testicles and young girls’ breasts? It’s not enough to ascribe this belief to an interpretation of sexuality as non-biological. We need to know why people choose that interpretation. We need to know why socialism has been chosen by so many, despite ample evidence of its failures. We need to know why in 2020 people chose put on useless masks and stay six feet away from others, and why they ignored the inventor of PCR when he said his invention wasn’t a test for disease. Why? My answer again is simple: Because that’s what other people chose to do and believe. Most men ape other men and disdain those who don’t. And the men other men choose to ape are those in charge.
Which leads us to the videos at top and bottom, above. At top, we find Kary Mullis again, this time in attack mode, going after the fraud that calls himself Dr. Anthony Fauci. Supporters of Fauci will not even listen to this, despite Mullis’ stature as a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist. They will not listen because their hero Fauci has mastered the image of being confidently in control, as exemplified in his recent TV appearance with Stephen Colbert, the bottom video above. Look at the man smile! Listen to him gently chide his enemies! Watch him exude the very air of leadership! Some gesticulating surfer guy (Mullis was a champion surfer) uttering his idea of “facts” is no match for a such a figure!
In a world in which facts are whatever propositions match your preferred interpretations, image is everything. All interpretations are equal; it is how you present your interpretation that makes a difference. Comparing Mullis to Fauci is not, in the current cultural atmosphere, a matter of what was previously called “true” or “false” but of who is displaying leadership. Leadership! That’s what people want. They don’t need some biochemist who won a prize for his little invention. All he does is tell his side of the story. He’s no leader! A leader is someone who knows how to re-interpret facts and make them serve some vision. Mullis points out in the top video that Fauci can lie into the camera shamelessly — as if that’s a bad thing! It’s actually a good thing when delivered with confidence and backed by power of a massive bureaucracy. Isn’t it?
To summarize my ontology of falsehood’s arrival:
1.) Somewhere in the Enlightenment, the West was cursed with the idea that if it’s not possible to prove X with mathematical certainty, then X and non-X are equally possible.
2. ) This led to subjectivism, the belief that all interpretations of phenomena are equally valid, and that a fact is whatever corresponds to one’s interpretation.
3.) While before the Enlightenment, universal truth was said to be accessible to all rational humans, the sudden insight of subjective “facts” divided humans into camps of wildly differing beliefs, generating a need for leaders — people who could assert their particular interpretations over the myriad interpretations of the masses.
4.) Thus the guillotine, communism, Fascism, and Anthony Fauci. Robespierre was a leader. Lenin was a leader. Hitler was a leader. Fauci is a leader.
We don’t need leaders.**
We need truth and people who follow the truth. Truth is a matter not of subjects with their “equally valid interpretations,” but of individuals armed with the ability to divide valid interpretations from invalid ones, people capable of knowing a fact from a falsehood.
We need to rid ourselves of Enlightenment nonsense that mathematics is the only path to certainty.
We need to stop worshiping image — which is, after all, just a short step away from idol-worship.
We need to stop lying and calling it opinion.
In the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld, the character of George Costanza is fond of saying, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Because George is an obvious schmuck who lies to escape responsibility, we laugh.
Fauci represents the same attitude.
We’re not laughing.
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* Nietzsche, more than any other philosopher, suffers from bad readings, misinterpretations, or worse. The most notorious of these was his long association with Naziism, the result of his anti-Semitic sister’s rewriting of his Will to Power following the philosopher’s death. She wove sentiments of German racial superiority into the texts of a man whose last spoken pronouncements included, “Anti-Semites should be shot.”
** Someone who enacts principles, fulfills obligations, and seeks restoration of valuable social qualities such as peace or freedom, is not a leader in the sense I use the word here. S/he is something far greater — a follower of truth.