The Ebony Tower

A Shadow At the Heart of University Science

To mark the long overdue and very welcome arrival of an applied mathematical and computer modelling [my former profession] hero of mine, Prof.

Norman Fenton

on to substack [

Norman Fenton and Martin Neil

/

Where are the numbers?

] ,

Flawed Covid definitions, data and modelling

I am reproducing here an article I originally published on facebook. This is from the time that it became increasingly worrying to me that the interventions and mandates being introduced were not based on science, but largely on mathematical models that I knew had zero ability to predict anything about real world, complex systems, and which should not be trusted. I could see there were likely going to be very bad repercussions.

At the same time, I saw very serious scientists like Prof. Fenton, whose chair [professorship] is in Risk Information Management, had actually done the proper risk-benefit analysis, and on warning of the potential harms, were being censored, silenced, and character assassinated, by other academics and scientists. I felt the need to speak out.

As a curious aside, it was Prof. Fenton’s recommendation that I should start my own blog, after I shared the original facebook version of the post below with him, that finally tipped the balance into me starting this very substack. Thus, in a very real sense, we would not now be here without him, so I hope this is fitting tribute.

The Ebony Tower

“I think in future years, people will look back on this time as one of total shame for academia. The very people in academia who should have been leading the charge to question what governments were telling us and to pursue the truth, have actually been the ones most prominent in censoring any attempts to pursue the truth.

It has been largely academics who pushed the government into the extreme restrictions and lockdowns. These include psychologists who were prominent at promoting the campaign of fear, which is well documented in minutes of meetings, a campaign to force people to comply with increasingly harsh restrictions and infringements of civil liberties, and then to close down any dissent against that.”

~ Prof. Norman Fenton

I have to agree that specific individual [by no means all] University based scientists or "academics" are far from being the heroes in the story of what has happened to us globally over the past two [at the time of writing] years.

However, to my mind, this confluence of events only revealed a darkness which was lurking all along in the halls of academia, for I believe there is a hidden shadow of trauma which pervades University science. This is something I noticed and encountered first hand myself during two decades as an academic, although I didn't have the words or concepts to describe or explain what I was seeing, and partaking in, at that time.

A very revealing exploration of some of these background issues, which I would recommend everyone to read, is provided by the Prof. Gerald Pollack in the introduction of his book “The 4th Phase of Water”, and a more in-depth analysis of everything which may be wrong with modern University science is greatly expanded on by Dr Iain McGilchrist in his new book "The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World". [See also Steve Patterson’s essay “Our Present Dark Age”, which I only discovered more recently].

My own observation was that academia is self-selecting and re-enforcing of certain “personality types”. Later, through Dr Laurence Heller's work on Developmental Trauma, I came to know that these personality traits are actually trauma Survival Styles, and I could map what I saw in academia, and indeed, how I personally was manifesting in the world back then, almost perfectly onto these. After all, it takes a certain way of attending to the world to be able to spend decades hyper-focussed on an ultra-specialized area of science.

[For more about these personality types, see my recent article below, in particular, my observation of academia is that it is self-selecting of folks who have Heller’s “Connection” survival style].

Personality Types, Traits, Tests and Chronic Illness

"The Ebony Tower" in the title is a play on words on "The Ivory Tower", the latter being a metaphor often used for University life: a state of privileged seclusion or separation from the facts and practicalities of the real world, in favour of mental and esoteric pursuits [which are also the over-arching themes of the Connection survival style].

I make the case here, in agreement with Prof. Fenton’s quote above, that the opportunity provided by the global situation emerging from China, produced a nightmarish version of this Ivory Tower, as the trauma survival styles were unleashed without the usual checks and balances inherent in the system.

Thus the Ebony Tower is the metaphorical place, the dark spire, from which certain academics, even more cut off from their peers than before, shielded from the civilization-level impacts of their words and behaviours behind Zoom screens, and utterly corrupted by the immense power to control peoples lives, have touched us all with the shadowy tendrils of the total authority granted to them by governments.