With the rapid development of science and technology in the 20th century, public consciousness has changed significantly. Before the mass liquidation of illiteracy among the population, religiosity, superstition, belief in mysticism were very widespread, and after a general increase in the level of education, it became much more difficult to believe in irrational mystical forces that govern the Universe as a whole and the lives of individuals in particular. Scientific knowledge proving its viability in practice, it would seem, should be stronger than an unbounded faith. Then, with similar trends, over time, superstitions should have completely disappeared from human culture, replaced by reliance on scientific knowledge. But life experience refutes this assumption. Why is this happening? In our opinion, there are 3 main reasons.
1) Superstitions are highly stable in the cultural space, often spreading like information viruses that penetrate a person's consciousness through his “vulnerabilities”. To bypass the "protection" of consciousness, superstitions begin to disguise themselves as scientific knowledge.
2) The spread of superstitions is facilitated by the lack of an integral scientific picture of the world in most modern people, built with the help of systems thinking. On the contrary, factual thinking is now spreading more and more, when reality is perceived as a set of incoherent facts (clip thinking).
3) In the absence of an integral picture of the world in a person, consciousness will inevitably try to build it in order to avoid decay and schizoidization. But without a firm support in scientific knowledge, an illusory support will be created in irrational dogmas and postulates.
There are many examples of such disguise of pseudoscientific dogmas as scientific knowledge. Consider one of the most common examples: the second law of thermodynamics.
The physical meaning of the second law of thermodynamics is as follows: "In an isolated system, entropy does not decrease."
It is clear that none of the people who seriously rely on scientific knowledge will argue with the physical law, because someone does not like it. People spreading pseudoscientific superstitions understand this very well, therefore they hide behind science to bypass the "protection" of consciousness. How does it work in practice?
We often hear very interesting statements that allegedly directly follow from the second law of thermodynamics:
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“Based on the second law of thermodynamics, evolution on Earth is impossible. Judge for yourself - it turns out that we are inevitably moving towards decay, entropy will inevitably grow.
For some, this will sound convincing, won't it? But what do we really have?
Any physical law has limits of applicability. For the second law of thermodynamics, the limit of applicability is clearly spelled out - the system must be isolated. Is the Earth an isolated system? Definitely not: the Earth interacts with the mass of cosmic bodies - from the Sun (from which a colossal energy flow comes) to small meteors, etc. - all the impacts cannot be listed.
That is, we have a kind of pseudoscientific dogma disguised as science. But what is its purpose? Surely most people who say something like this have no conscious purpose. They just repeat something they think is "smart" without trying to analyze. However, behind the pseudoscientific dogma that we have heard, there is something more serious - the philosophical postulate that the Earth will inevitably degrade. In turn, this postulate is directly related to another: humanity needs to return to the Golden Age, when everything was better than now. This is usually followed by a series of frankly pseudoscientific discourses on the topic of highly developed “spiritual” or prehuman civilizations (Atlantis, Hyperborea, Lemuria) and everything finally slides into myth-making, which has absolutely nothing to do with science. The search for the roots of the postulates described above will lead us to quite definite philosophical ideas based on the Gnostic medieval heresies, which in turn became the source of such political ideology as fascism.
It turns out that the cultural space we have is teeming with ideologically charged pseudoscientific postulates, behind which anything can stand. And in the mind of a person with the help of indirect methods of influence, a certain picture of the world can be formed. This can only be opposed by scientific knowledge, systemic thinking and a practical assessment of the consequences of a person's acceptance of certain views as a philosophy of life.
