There's a quote that's been rattling thru my brain lately

I read it many years ago as a frontispiece epigram in (maybe) Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene or some other book of that particular focus in that particular time period -- sociobiology. 

Just one category and version of the kind of science/ sociology/ psychology, book which posits an interesting theory, one worth considering, but ends up being used by some people to justify and prove that being the mean, selfish, cruel gold-plated sonofabitch he or she has become is OK, and also a very very good thing for him or her to have become.


It prompts the kind of self-justificational claptrap with which some people try to prove they shouldn't be criticized for their behavior, as in "I'm ok, you're ok," a statement of supposed scientific validity which, when made, makes us so pleased to be found to be ok, we slide over noticing that the person putting it forth is seriously NOT ok in any way.
 (My ex-wife of many many years ago put it well: 
"If people like that like you, you need to worry about what you are.")


It's not enough for that study to be used as self- justificational but self-aggrandizing too, as if it's not only ok to exhibit the sort of behavior that every religious, ethical, social standard in the world eschews, and demands that person be excluded from decent human company whether by exile, being sent to Coventry, put in prison, tarred and feathered or shot immediately as a rabid dog --asserting that the particular behavior is not only OK, but it is an admirable thing and to be aspired to by the BEST people...

And having something like documentation to prove oneself THE BEST is essential, whether it's having gone to the best college ("If it weren't  the best why would the richest most powerful people send their children there?") or having gotten the most money either from inheritance or highway robbery or proving that the people one dislikes are actually as bad or worse than what we see the person in question being. 

Same thing is also used to prove that we -- whoever we may be -- have the right to disparage other cultures, customs, religions, or social organizations without first acknowledging that one's own group belief makes no more sense, and possibly less than that which is being crapped on. 


Anyway, I make no aspersion on Richard Dawkins, or for that matter, the late Arthur Janov, Wilhelm Reich,  Lev Trotsky or G.I. Gurdjieff. This is only about the people who use such thinkers' work for the purposes I mentioned.


A book is not responsible for the behavior of its readers any more than any idea is responsible for its followers, and this one had an interesting quote to start itself off...

I'm being approximate, because if I still have it -- and it is, in fact, THAT book -- I can't find it in any of the stacks and boxes of books around here.

BUT, in essence, the quote was something like:

"People think the process of science is 
finding and proving things that are true forever.
But the process of science is actually involved in 
finding and proving things that are false forever."

Worth thinking about.
 

"We don't see things as they are -- we see things as we are."
Moses Maimonides