Contact with Reality
Even endless stories start somewhere
[Author’s Note: The initial intention of this essay was a review of the movie Contact, and in this endeavor I have failed.]
Liberals are allergic to reality. The full stack of their beliefs, their preferences, their methods, and their habits runs contrary to most of what Nature teaches and tells. They pretend that race is not real, that gender sex is a distinction with no differences, that physics is a prop, and that math is an arbitrary art form with the sole purpose of illustrating “learning” in montages, usually by way of dry erase marker on clear glass. Though they often use the visual and narrative trappings of “science” to demonstrate their supposed sophistication, their “reality allergy” is clearly demonstrated by their blind worship of science concurrent with their dissonant rejection of the scientific method. Ask any libtard this simple question if you doubt this: “what is science?”
There are many ways to answer that question, and many of the possible answers are true, true enough, interesting, enlightening, or inspiring. Far more are plain wrong; technically incorrect, true but trivial, deceitful, or dumb. Whatever answer you proffer or prefer, the simplest answer is: science is a method for constructively asking questions. Anyone who cannot accept this, or understand why it is the “correct” answer is quite likely a Scienceist (Cy-ents-ist)
Scienceism
For most of my life, scienceism has been the dominant religion of the American Elite as well as their most dedicated clients and hangers-on. It easily cohabitates with progressivism, though I believe they are discreet religious formulations unto themselves. Progressivism as a faith has been around for a substantially longer period of time than scienceism, but the former paved the way for the latter to dominate Occidental Society. The religious nature of scienceism is the reason why good liberals cannot give a correct answer to the “what is science” question.
Humans are faithful creatures. It is exceedingly rare for a human to be truly areligious, and those that declare themselves free of religiosity are lying1. Religiousness takes on different meanings, but the materialist root is a set of actions and/or practices repeated frequently with a specific interval. Going to church every Sunday; wearing BLM regalia at work; listening to a specific podcast at a specific time the same time each week/month. All of these are “religious” practices in terms of structured participation. Regardless of your personal opinions on God, faith, theology, or culture, the fact is that religiosity is a powerful tool for the construction and maintenance of Society because it is an inextricable element of human spirituo-biology. It may be the case that the inherent religiosity of human creatures is a byproduct of civilization, but I think it is actually the reverse, and the ubiquitous proclivity for religiosity precipitated the ability to form Societies2.
We are all religious. It is in our DNA, in both the biological and societal senses of that term. If you set aside all thoughts on theology and philosophy temporarily and just look at humans as bipedal primates, it’s pretty easy to fathom how religiosity is one of the key components for stable societies and dependable industry & commerce. But we cannot leave theology or philosophy aside for long because they are woven into the framework of the how and why of the way things work. My point is, you cannot get religiousness out of human institutions.
Humans continuously and relentlessly seek to worship
When the Catholics were conquering Europe, they could kill all the pagans they wanted3 but they could not remove the heathen faith structures without replacing them. With one simple trick4, they did more to extirpate heathenism than any army, genocide, or campaign of rapine ever could5. This was also done in Meso- and Suramerica. Of course, every true believer wants devout and zealous converts as a result of their proselytizing, but time waits for no man, and “best possible” will always be superseded by “close enough.”
What’s interesting about the “close enough” method of religious domination is that after a few generations, the true believers and Sunday Christians are only distinguishable by their works6. Put another way, to your great-grandkids, you will either be a Christian or not, there will be no one there to explain the finer points of your highly specific and stylized faith relationship. So all of those not-quite-converts, secretly praying to Mithras while they wore a crucifix and attended Mass, are just Christians to their descendants, unless they went to extraordinary lengths to make sure their kids, their kid’s kids, and their kid’s kid’s kids were all keeping up the same duality deceit. For the vast majority of people, this did not happen.
Scienceism’s takeover of the American elite and the educated groups of the citizenry occurred at a relatively fast rate over the latter half of the 20th century, but the curve was exponential, so it took a very long time to get to the point where it predominated in elite subgroups. You can see it make significant inroads in the first half of the 20th century with notable incidents like the Scopes Monkey Trial. America’s elite was dominated by progressivism after it marched through the institutions between 1870 and 19307, so the uptake of scienceism was far faster than it would have been had it been required to compete directly with Christianity. The takeover of the commoner mental topography was comparatively gradual, more in line with generational turnover than epochal mass conversion.
Postmodern Religiosity
One of the most critical, and effective, fronts on which this religious crusade was fought was Entertainment. There would be no legal gay marriage without decades of normalization and veneration by Hollywood. Movies & music are demonstrably more insidious than sermons & speeches. Sodomite normalization was carried on the sweaty backs of A-listers, and so too was the good news of scienceism. In 2025, heavy-handed scienceist religious dogma isn’t even remarkable, but not long ago, in historiographic terms, this was not the case. The China Syndrome (1979) did more to retard the development of nuclear power in America than any protest, book, or zealous scaremonger, but the relatively ideologically diverse community of movie producers, directors, writers, and investors at the time meant that pure propaganda flicks intended to “change society’s mind” had immense hurdles with which to contend8.
The death of the studio-backed auteur was approximately 1977 with the release and failure of Sorcerer concurrent with the runaway success of Episode IV: A New Hope. The studio was no longer held hostage by creative genius and the risks that attend such creatures. Now, they could just throw money at projects to get above the “wow factor” threshold and let merchandising & repetition do the rest. Commoditized gayness also took advantage of this methodology, as did scienceism. Of course, there was no dearth of sodomites or scientists on the silver screen, or behind it for that matter, when the Auteur ruled the roost, but the holistic pivot to “chasing blockbuster status with schlock” method meant influence operations need not primarily be accurate or precise, rather instead be numerous9. But not every movie can be a Star War, and some offering had to breach Chesterton’s Maginot Line for the wave assault of drivel to work its magic on the midwit mind10.
From the moment some jew or WASP paid people to crank cameras and projectors, the countdown clock on church domination of religions in the West started ticking over. Humans continue to follow the timeless maxim of Monkey See, Monkey Do. Great advancements have been made in this principle over time. Sometimes, we don’t need to see the monkey, we only need to hear of what the monkey is doing. Other times, we do the opposite of what we see the monkey do. We will even mimic a monkey that has been distributed through a collection of ape simulation products across time and space, where we see no monkey, we don’t do anything specific or consciously, but there is still a hyperstitionated monkey doing things because their brain saw a monkey their eyes couldn’t fathom. Nonetheless, we remain simple, bipedal thinker/doer machines. Seeing gorgeous people projected to literal larger than life proportions overwhelmed thousands of years of social programming, and it only took a few decades.
Reverend Celluloid
Contact came out in theaters in 1997. The movie is based on a novel by the same name written by St. Carl Sagan the Mellifluous (PBUH) and some female of no particular renown11. The story follows a little girl that becomes an adult human without fundamentally changing in any appreciable way outside of anatomical maturity. She likes to look at stars and use radios, and her Mom is invisible, and her Dad dies in the first act because he doesn’t get his magic science pills in time. She then goes to stargazing school, and then she goes pro with the looking at stars BUT she also gets the radio thing in on the act because she uses radio antennas12. Some stuff happens, and there’s a bad White guy but there’s also a good White guy, and then more stuff happens, then aliens send a Hitler text message, then a lot of stuff happens, then Ace from Starship Troopers immanentizes his eschaton (this is not good for the bad White guy), then the little girl in a woman’s body goes to space but also not space for 15 hours where she sees her Dad but it’s not her Dad, then the movie ends (I have not read the book13).
I am being a bit unfair here, because Contact is actually an exceptionally good movie by almost every measure that matters. There’s a scene in particular that is possibly one of the more interesting sequences ever shot. The locations are perfect, the casting is perfect, the props and lighting are unquestionably good. The story moves with almost no stutters or jags until the very end, and it deserves to be remembered as one of the best movies to come out of the 90s in a technical sense, which is saying something because the 1990s were the undeniable pinnacle of analog cinema. The movie is awesome the first time you watch it, and it absolutely holds up after 3 decades14. If you haven’t seen it, it is worth the 3 hours and I recommend you watch it.
…just, well, ok, before you watch it, you should know that Contact was integral in hastening the rot of the foundations of Christendom, instrumental in wrecking Western society, and more than a little bit responsible for contributing to the spiritual rape of White culture. If you can overlook these little oopsies, it’s a phenomenal film.
Before Everything Was Computer
It is important to understand that reality is not the same thing as facts. Progressives and scienceists are allergic to reality, but they absolutely adore facts. Reality just is. It never pauses, it doesn’t go on hold, and it can’t be exsanguinated, dissected, then observed in isolation. A butterfly pinned to a corkboard is not, by any measure of reality, an actual butterfly. It is the echo of the creature that once was. This echo has value, as a beautiful thing worthy of consideration, but it is like a snapshot of a person in that the critical context required for insight is some kind of direct experience with, or knowledge of, the actual thing that once was. Facts are like pinned butterflies, and can be used for teaching or decoration just as easily as they can be tools for constructing elaborate fictions, or deceits.
Scienceists love facts because postmodern society, in the aggregate, cannot discern a distinction between assemblages of fact and reality. A pile of facts, when bound up in the proper delivery mechanism, serves as a proxy for reality to the postmodern mind. Scienceists love “facts of evolution” but despise the reality of evolution. When evolution is being used as a cudgel against Christians in particular or faith in general, they are ardent adherents of the concept. When evolution is used to point out the realities of race or the differences of sex, they despise and disregard it.
Assemblages of fact can be used to argue for and against the same concept at the same time. A climate zealot of scienceism will demand you kneel to “the facts” and obey the will of the scientific consensus on global warming, then instantly pivot to political rhetoric and ad hominem in faithful devotion to the narrative if “the hockey stick” or the Climate-gate Emails enter the discussion. Likewise, a coronatarian, which is but a sect of greater scienceism, will bathe in heatmaps and data tables as they hide from their own children who have been outside, but completely ignore the disappearance of flu cases in the data from 2020, or the mounting evidence of the harmful persistence of spike protein in the Vaxx’d.
Great swarms of facts, coalescing into towering thunderheads of science, threatening to strike a zillion volts of truth into the backwards worms wriggling in the dirt of willful ignorance; I am become the science, destroyer of chuds.
Scienceism is the mainline faith of American culture. It completely dominates elite circles, and is the majority religion the middle and lower classes15. The power and sway of scienceism is at least on par with the power of Protestantism in America prior to World War 0216, but a decent argument could be made that it is even more powerful due to the catalysts of cheap compute and mass entertainment. The Protestants insisted that each man had both right and responsibility to discern God’s Word from the Bible for himself, but the faith tradition still relied heavily upon ordained spokesmen. Scienceism has its spokesmen too, even spokeswomen! but they serve more as “script updaters” than guides, teachers, or preachers. The Science abides; always trustworthy, always relevant, always applicable.
If a scienceist gets The Science wrong, it wasn’t The Science, it was their lack of understanding. When persons, communities, or countries fail to Trust In Science, natural disasters strike them. If a culture or tradition does not comport with the dictates of The Science, it deserves to be extirpated. The Science abides, yea, it is everlasting, even unto the heat death of the Sun.
Soft Pedaling the Primrose Path
Once upon a time, our society was not so enamored with The Science as a totalizing construct. Science was a more narrow & deep concept, held captive by the boundaries laid out at the beginning of this essay. In that era, the scientific method was applied rigorously by some, shoddily by others, and across wide domains of thought and intention. A very good primer for the history of the scientific method applied is A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. This text will give you a surprisingly detailed tour of the natural world is it is popularly understood alongside a stupendously well documented account of how The Science was built, and who did the building17. If we arbitrarily start with Newton and work forward to Dyson, it will become rather obvious that not only is Science, meaning the scientific method, a process for asking questions, as a social phenomenon there is very little cohesion and practically no unanimity.
Everything you think is known, every subject you assume is settled, all the questions you believe are answered, it isn’t, it’s not, and they aren’t. You can pick any domain, drill down into any category, isolate any single aspect, and, if you actually go to the documented research, you will find a rough consensus with notable detractors or even vociferous opposition. The whole of The Science is an elaborate, messy construction composed of massed consensuses. This wasn’t really a problem when everyone was applying the scientific method, because, so long as the application was being done consistently, the disagreements were over tangible inconsistencies, incongruities, and inexplicables. But even in the glory days of scientific development, there were countless grifters, hucksters, and frauds muddling the process and muddying the waters.
When the scientific community was a large collection of amateurs and eccentrics chasing their curiosity and applying the method, the distance that Occidental understanding went was truly spectacular. Some fraud might get fake fossils into the museums and journals, but inevitable some sperg or autist would figure it out. Some grifter might bamboozle huge swathes of observers and participants, but eventually someone would demonstrate that the assertions were incorrect, or the results were not replicable, or the specimens were fake. This natural turbulence, damaging though it could be by making dead ends seem like gateways, actually refined methods and contributed to better practices and shrewder participants.
Unfortunately for all of us, The Science was birthed into society by the “taming of the frontier.” Using the war efforts as a pretext, political and ideological interests dragged the amateurs out of their basements and forced them into the breeding pastures of the university-controlled lab network. There are demonstrable benefits to both standardization of methods and pooling of resources & equipment, but they are vastly outweighed by the “consensus necessity” that is part and parcel of a functioning Education Entertainment Complex. Soulless corporations don’t care about the magic of the scientific method, they want easily controlled researchers & technicians, and easily documentable & exploitable patents. If different bodies of thought or thinkers disagree on the finer points of a position or process, murky legality and exploitable business/commercial advantages create intolerable risk. Who cares if the scientific method is not being applied, there are jobs, endowments, profits, and influence on the line!
It is easy to blame corporations and capitalists because, in the 21st century, every American is some type of Marxist, but the worse offenders are the members and patrons of the Academy. Whether it was intentional, accidental, or inevitable, the overwhelming majority of the Academy are Progressives, and Scienceism is far too powerful a tool and faction to not expand and exploit. If the perception of totalizing consensus can’t be engendered in greater society, than the whole thing, whatever it is, has to stay sequestered from official The Science. Once something has become part of The Science, it is no longer up for debate. This is because scienceism is a religion.
The Looming Schism
You might find all this depressing, I certainly do, but you can take heart for the simple fact that religion, all religions, are always in danger of implosion or decay. This may have something to do with lip service vs true belief, but that’s a topic for another time, and honestly someone much more devout, informed, and capable. Whatever the reason, schism and/or collapse is an ever present risk for organized religion, and scienceism is no exception. There are multiple contributing factors, and it’s anyone’s guess as to which will be the most blamed, but for my part I think the consequences of the unparalleled ascendancy of the Coronatarian denomination, coupled with it’s swift decline, and in conjunction with the the levels of rabid zealotry that were permitted, will be the fracture point of organized scienceism. Religious zealots have their uses, but they are always a liability when it comes to seriousness because if you are not afraid of a zealot, you are laughing at him:
I personally believe it is impossible, but I also believe the “cigarettes cause cancer” memeplex is a pack of lies initially confabulated to suppress the southern economy but subsequently propagated to obfuscate the rampant cancers caused by manipulations and additives in processed food, so…
Among other things; necessary but not sufficient.
And boy did they ever lmao.
Take pagan deity with left hand, wave magic cross with right hand, a saint appears, and hey presto, there’s a good Catholic right in front of it!
These do actually work too, but they take a lot more effort over a substantially longer period of time, and in certain cases, like with Europeans, they are strategically suboptimal in the long run.
This is a deep and hilarious irony, particularly for my sect of Christianity, and I do not wish to offend the devout of any segment of Cladistic Christianity. I am not making a theological observation here, this statement is a purely materialistic observation.
These are rough numbers, not intended to defended on the grounds of precision.
Yarvin contends that prior to the ascendency of Liberal Democracy in Europe, there was a massive amount of intellectual diversity. Things like the First War of Progressive Domination hammered out differences betwixt and variations between, leaving us with a more-or-less monoculture in modes of thought & being in the Academy. I agree with this assertion, and I think something similar occurred in the film industry in particular and the creative arts in general from roughly 1950 to 2000.
“Quantity has a quality all its own.” - Covfefe Anon (June 1215)
This is where I was going to launch the review of Contact. It probably would have been interesting lmao.
You may know her as “Madame Not-Appearing-In-This-Essay.”
I am being excessively glib here because radio astronomy is actually really cool. But I must also share that if I was a 7D star daemon trying to take over the distributed human ur-mind I would definitely use energy wobbles from really far away.
I will never read the book.
Though to be fair and circumspect, movies have taken a severe nosedive.
Most “religious” Americans are Scienceists with Christian Characteristics.
The Second Global War of Progressive Aggression
Spoiler: it’s all men, and they’re all White. If this doesn’t sit well with you, this essay will make you feel even worse.
What's the context on the fractions exchange?