Professor Zichichi, in his important paper presented earlier today on Science as the Motor for Progress, stated that the first great achievement of our human intellect, on which all logic and science is based, was the development of language. Language enabled mankind to be able to control, inhibit, delay and transform the gratification of the physical emotions and desires of hunger, aggression, anxiety, terror, envy and the sexual drives. The development of language not only facilitated communication between individuals but also communication within the self (the capacity to reflect and remember) and between groups of people and succeeding generations. This made possible the growth of logic, and later science. However evolution and development did not remove emotion, nor did it remove the possibility of a falling back or regression into emotionally driven mental functioning and behaviour and the dissolution of the more advanced thinking capacities, as happens for example in mental illness. Individuals they can lose the capacity to think rationally and logically not only as a result of mental illness, but also of organic damage or emotional overload. All of us as individuals can find our capacity to think logically being transiently affected by anger through a reversal in fortunes or a humiliation, or more positively by falling in love. However when someone falls mentally ill such a disturbance of their thinking is not so transient and is not necessarily removed merely by improving their external circumstances. One of the disturbances of thinking which can appear in psychotic mental illness is the 'delusion '. This is a fixed false belief, out of line with the person's cultural context, and from which the person cannot be persuaded by rational argument or reasonable evidence. Their appreciation of reality is distorted to fit their delusionary belief, rather than their delusion being susceptible to disproof by confronting reality. Fixed false beliefs can also arise in groups where they are widely shared by many people with a common cultural context. This is not however a sign of widespread individual psychotic illness and disturbance. What is it that makes whole groups or communities hold to fixed false beliefs contrary to reasonable evidence? Why do communities hold to what we would regard as non-scientific thinking? It is not only in the mental life of individuals that irrationality can take over, ,but also in the thinking of a group or community. This often happens when there is deep group anxiety—a fear of economic chaos, physical external attack, or threats to religious faith, culture or other aspects of the group's identity. Science and scientific thinking, which one can see as the characteristic of healthy, rational functioning in a group or community, can be damaged when communities descend into fundamentalism which is anti-scientific and produces a primitive form of religion or of group thinking in general. But this descent into the irrational does not only arise where there is a direct attack on the scientific approach from anti-science fundamentalists. The scientific approach can also be corrupted from 'inside the camp' as it were. The scientific approach demands that in the face of uncertainty we take a rational approach which accepts that there is uncertainty, and that we may have to live with 'not knowing' for a long time until the truth becomes possible. In addition, economic markets are largely a function of group psychology rather than mathematical calculus, and so psychological contrarians are as likely to be able predict outcomes as the mathematical economic analysts.We need the culture of science to protect us from disaster, but we need a scientific understanding of man's irrationality, especially irrationality in group functioning, to help us protect science and the scientific method from being abused by some who claim to be its adherents, resulting in the misleading of the majority of our people and the po
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