Despite all else, the Western World still considers the final arbiter of truth to be reality.

We all take it for granted that statistical proof MATTERS. In science, no matter who said what, the final authority is evidence.

No other society was ever aware that there was such a thing as statistical proof.

Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis cut childbed fever death, which had killed a major percentage of mothers and babies in that ward, to zero, year after year, but even as late as the mid-nineteenth century, it made no difference. The University Doctors of Medicine would not stoop to washing their hands between dissections and delivering babies.

How did Newton ever convince a world that still looked to translations of Aristotle and the Old Testament for its cosmology to look to gravity instead?

How did we go from Galen and bleeding to real medicine inside the nineteenth century?

Every previous society had built its entire intellectual life on NOTHING.

To be an intellectual you QUOTED:  “It is written …”

Every intellectual stated that men have more teeth than women, because Aristotle had said so. Even if someone had counted teeth endlessly they would have convinced nobody.

What is unique is that the West has, in SOME cases, allowed evidence to actually defeat Nothing..

Oriental Wisdom and the American Indian Wisdom we hear about were Nothing.

Creation Myths were adopted because they sounded good and “It is written.”

Then Isaac Newton came along saying that the whole universe could be explained by using simple GRAVITY!

Occam’s Razor knocked the whole gigantic structure of Western Confusionism down!

In a century — AFTER the “Renaissance” — all the Ancient Authorities and all the crap about “balancing humors” was destroyed and modern medicine began.

None of these revolutions could have occurred outside the Western world, because there was no way to go gradually from the Flat Earth to Newton, from Galen to medical sanity.

You simply could not show the slightest respect for Galen’s Balance of Humors and move to Modern Medicine.

In order to introduce Occam’s Razor, you had to state flatly that a thousand years of everything that had been “intellectualism” was pure crap!

Exactly the same holds for Mantra Thinking.

There is no room for Respectful Opposition.

All present political debate is a pile of horsehockey, and there is simply no nice way to say that.