Totalitarian society

The Lysenko affair is one of the most thoroughly documented and horrifying examples of the politicization of science, but no country or age is immune. In totalitarian societies politicized science often leads to tragedy in democratic societies politicized science often ends in wasted time and effort and sometimes in farce. 

To illustrate the different histories of politicized science in totalitarian societies and democracies, I will compare Lysenko s biology in the Soviet Union with the history of cold fusion in the United States. Most of my discussion of cold fusion has been taken from the excellent book by John Huizenga, Cold Fusion The Scientific Fiasco of the Century. ... 

Politicized science is an inevitable part of the human condition, but society must strive to control it Although history shows that politicized science does much more damage in totalitarian societies than in democracies, even democracies are sometimes stampeded into doing very foolish and damaging things. 

In the early 1970s, the Author was in touch with Professor Johannes Muller of the German Democratic Republic. Muller (1970) created systematic heuristics for domestic use in the area of inventive designing. (The Author even wrote a book chapter on the method [Arciszewski 1978].) The name systematic heuristics is a compressed analogy combining two contra-dictive concepts, and obviously such a science could be developed only in a totalitarian society, providing another proof of the impact of environment on creators. 

The choice of = 1.5 and T = 50 in Fig. 2.13 b corresponds to a situation in a totalitarian society with slow changes in the preference trend d f). The prevalent, adaptation stabilized opinion initially remains stable although the indi-... 

Summarizing, the model solutions of Figs. 13 and 14 can be interpreted as suggesting that totalitarian societies produce - even after delusively stable periods - hard, revolutionary and in their details unpredictable transitions in their socio-configuration. 

It is left to the reader to apply - and to extend the implications inherent in -the model in making an inital interpretation of many relevant events of recent history, in particular of the smooth evolutionary transitions in liberal societies and the hard revolutionary transitions in totalitarian societies (e.g. the Carter-Reagan change represents a smooth transition and the Shah-Ayatollah change a hard transition). 

To oppose the freezer programme goes against the tenets of the Free World, proclaims Ettinger, and any such opposition is symptomatic of a mind warped by totalitarian ideology, believing that the individual is of less importance than the race, the state or society. 

It should be apparent from this discussion that Soviet principles of medical ethics are an integral part of the collectivist ethic of Communism, just as the Hippocratic principles are of the individualist ethic of the Free West. Each of these moral codes reflects a different solution of the perennial problem of the conflict between the individual and society. Each prescribes a different code of conduct for the physician, especially in those cases where the interests of the citizen and of the state conflict. Accordingly, in totalitarian countries, the physician is often compelled to act as the patient s adversary whereas in free countries, he need almost never do so. ... 

The political theorist Langdon Winner (1977) described the first position - advocated in the writings of critics like EUul and Mumford - as an ideology of technological politics. This view had two defining tenets (i) technical decisions were inherently political, and thus technological systems embodied political philosophies and (ii) once the dominant system was sufficiently advanced, it would become autonomous. Analysis between society s is and its ought would drive reasoned action to liberate man from totalitarian rationality. In the absence of blueprints for a human-centered society, one s first task was to become aware of his place in the system. 

When K lor K = 1.07 as shown in Fig. 2.5 an interpretation in terms of a society at the crossroads between a liberal and a totalitarian state can be made. The reason for this is the higher willingness of the individual to adapt to the prevailing opinion. As can be seen in Figs. 2.3 b and c and Fig. 2.5 the value iTc = 1 is the critical value of the trend parameter k, where for (5 = 0 the potential (2.129) changes from the monostable to the bistable form when all the possible consequences for bifurcation etc., as discussed in Sect. 2.3, can be observed. 

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