In social science discussions, you will often hear the term “counter-intuitive.”
The term “counter-intuitive” is summed up in the phrase used by every con man since the Garden of Eden:
“Things are not as they appear.”
Actually things are almost always exactly as they appear. If they were not, every animal on earth that has eyes would have lost those eyes long ago due to survival of the fittest.
By the time the Roman doctor Galen wrote up his theory of medicine in Roman times, people had long since noticed that a person who lost blood weakened and a person who lost too much blood died. The problem was that anybody could tell you that.
Galen came up with a theory about “balancing the four humors in the body.” Galen said the way to treat diseases was to drain blood out of the body. Let’s see some illiterate peasant come up with THAT!
Galen’s theory caught on big time. It became official policy taught in every university for almost two thousand years. When George Washington got pneumonia, his doctors killed him by draining over a quart of blood from his body.
Bleeding never worked, but the important thing was that it was something a peasant wouldn’t come up with. It was Intellectual, you see.
All frauds and all primitive sciences come up with “counterintuitive solutions.” Every historian readily admits that today’s social sciences are primitive, but no historian has ever applied the experience of every other primitive science to today’s history.
So social science today is one solid mass of “counter-intuitive” ideas. Just as primitive medicine bled people to cure them, modern social science says that if honest citizens are threatened by career violent criminals, you should disarm the honest citizens. The way to a better education, says the social scientist, is to bus children into the nastiest ghettoes you can find. It multicultures them. And punishment is no way to deal with crime, they tell us.
And so forth.
It’s the same old crap as medical bleeding, and it works every bit as well.
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