May 12, 2024

The amount of power that fraud produces depends on the amount of rationality it destroys.

Ancient charlatanism could not destroy much rationality, because there wasn't much knowledge to produce rationality. The social effects could be overwhelming; but that is not the power of fraud, it's the weakness of the social order. Fraud acquires a lot more power in the modern society, because there is a lot more rationality to be destroyed.

There are several dimensions to fraud in the recent society. One dimension is dumbing down of the public. Social media has that purpose. It distracts youngsters, so they don't find out what is going on.

Another dimension of fraud is propaganda. It became significant leading up to WW-II, as media became more complex and available. Looking back, that propaganda was quite crude. Now days, the propaganda is much more complex and pervasive but subtle. A lot more rationality is destroyed, since there is more rationality to be destroyed.

Nothing compares to science and technology fraud for reducing the social order to rubble, since society has become highly dependent upon science and technology. On top of the pervasiveness, the illusiveness is extreme due to the incongruous nature of the technicalities. In physics in particularly, the abstractions are too illusive for most physicists, let alone the public.

Science and technology add another strange dimension to the power of fraud, which is imagination substituting for objective reality with futuristic absurdities added in, such as going to other planets and populating the universe. Also included is fake intelligence from machines, which redirects a large amount of energy and resources toward absurdities.

All of that fraud is power for incompetent corrupters, which is why it occurs. It is as powerful as it is disruptive. So-called artificial intelligence is not influencing much in a direct manner beyond the ridiculous amount of electrical energy and rare metals being wasted. Yet it is quite destructive in distracting from solving real problems. It's the attention focus upon corrupters that gives them the power to destroy large chunks of the social order.

The danger and damage of fraud are in the combination of nonfunctional processes and the power that is shifted to incompetent corrupters. Their power means more damage to processes in the future.

The examples which have gone beyond futurism and generated a lot of social disruption are fake renewable energy, electric vehicles and self-driving. A lot of persons are paying the price for the frauds, while propagandists keep pounding futurism into peoples' heads claiming that the big payoffs are just around the corner—the corner that is several decades long already, with resources being depleted and energy sources becoming nonfunctional.

That much power to destroy with no opposition being allowed says it is not a nuclear war that will destroy planet Earth but the frauds of fake science and technology that give incompetent corrupters power. They get sociology and economics as screwed up as the science and technology which generates their power. At some point a nuclear war might be added to the brew, but only in response to the damage that has already been done through incompetents generating power through fraudulent science and technology.

The important point is that it is the advancement of complex science and technology that handed incompetent corrupters the power to destroy. Less science and technology would mean less power to destroy. Should science and technology be stifled; or should social structures be improved to resist fraud?