Nexus - 1706 - New Times Magazine-pages

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SOME Bic LIES OF MONEY, MEDICINE AND SCIENCE SOME BIG LIES MONEY, SCIENCE MEDICINE AND A tenured Canadian physics professor, fired for his dissidence, breaks ranks by asserting that established orthodoxy in economics, medicine and science is intended as a web of lies to shield and maintain power structures. [T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. Tiaeald Dintae MALAIT Anteen (1 iba send AANE he maintenance of the hierarchical structures that control our lives depends on Pinter's "vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed". Therefore, the main institutions that embed us into the hierarchy, such as schools, universities and mass media and entertainment corporations, have a primary function to create and maintain this tapestry. They include establishment scientists and all service intellectuals in charge of "interpreting" reality. In fact, the scientists and "experts" define reality in order to bring it into conformity with the always-adapting dominant mental tapestry of the moment. They also invent and build new branches of the tapestry that serve specific power groups by providing new avenues of exploitation. These high priests are rewarded with high class status. The Money Lie The economists are a most significant example. It is probably not an accident that in the United States at the end of the 19th century the economists were the first professional analysts to be "broken in" in a battle that defined the limits of academic freedom in universities. The academic system from that point on would impose a strict operational separation between enquiry and theorising as acceptable, and social reform as unacceptable.' Any academic wishing to preserve her position understood what this meant. As a side product, academics became virtuosos at nurturing a self- image of importance, despite this fatal limitation on their societal relevance, with verbiage such as "the truth is our most powerful weapon", "the pen is mightier than the sword", "a good idea can change the world", "reason will take us out of darkness", etc. So the enterprise of economics became devoted to masking the lie about money. Bad lending practices, price fixing and monopolistic controls were the main threats to the natural justice of a free market, and occurred only as errors in a mostly self-regulating system that could be moderated via adjustments of interest rates and other "safeguards". Meanwhile, no mainstream economic theory makes any mention of the fact that money itself is created wholesale in a fractional reserve banking system owned by secret private interests given a licence to fabricate and deliver debt that must be paid back (with interest) from the real economy, by Denis G. Rancourt, PhD © June 2010 NEXUS ¢ 39 — Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005 OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 2010 www.nexusmagazine.com