In the late 1940’s Russian scientists had found themselves subjected to the political witch hunting by Stalin's regime. Before that such witch hunting was limited to poets, artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians, who often saw their works assailed by communist officials on the grounds of "ideological impurity" or "bourgeois influence". That time science and scientists became the victim. In a really Orwellian style genetics, psychologists and cybernetics were fired, exiled and even killed. But the most alarming and often overlooked fact is that Lysenkoism was not an aberration or "excess" but a natural product of Stalinism. Moreover an important observation that the author is trying to communicate by writing this paper is that while the original form was a byproduct of Stalinism, the phenomenon itself is more universal and can be considered as a special, previously unknown flavor of high demand cult. For simplicity we will call if technocult. This paper tried to show that Lysenkoism was the first successful attempt to transplant high demand religious cults methods into scientific community and should be understood as such. The main point of this paper is that Lysenkoism is not only about intellectual pogrom, destruction of real science by pseudoscience committed in the name of a particular political agenda and more or less openly supported by the ruling party/government officials. It is also (and probably more important) a self-sustainable cult-like system of distortions, omissions, and lies that are designed to support faulty or fraudulent research of the selected "politically correct" pseudo-scientists. In this sense it's closely related to "cargo cult" phenomenon that is better known in the Western hemisphere as well as science distortions that are associated with the military-industrial complex....SO MUCH FOR 'ENLIGHTEN' SCIENCE
How do I turn on the magnifying feature...I can hardly read font that small.
Interesting quote. Where did it come from?
In the late 1940’s Russian scientists had found themselves subjected to the political witch hunting by Stalin’s regime. Before that such witch hunting was limited to poets, artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians, who often saw their works assailed by communist officials on the grounds of “ideological impurity” or “bourgeois influence”.
That time science and scientists became the victim. In a really Orwellian style genetics, psychologists and cybernetics were fired, exiled and even killed. But the most alarming and often overlooked fact is that Lysenkoism was not an aberration or “excess” but a natural product of Stalinism. Moreover an important observation that the author is trying to communicate by writing this paper is that while the original form was a byproduct of Stalinism, the phenomenon itself is more universal and can be considered as a special, previously unknown flavor of high demand cult. For simplicity we will call if technocult.
This paper tried to show that Lysenkoism was the first successful attempt to transplant high demand religious cults methods into scientific community and should be understood as such. The main point of this paper is that Lysenkoism is not only about intellectual pogrom, destruction of real science by pseudoscience committed in the name of a particular political agenda and more or less openly supported by the ruling party/government officials.
It is also (and probably more important) a self-sustainable cult-like system of distortions, omissions, and lies that are designed to support faulty or fraudulent research of the selected “politically correct” pseudo-scientists. In this sense it’s closely related to “cargo cult” phenomenon that is better known in the Western hemisphere as well as science distortions that are associated with the military-industrial complex....