The deficiency of beliefs founded in reason lies in that reason can only operate on what is set before it. It then follows that rational processes are interminable unless an end is put to the prospective evidence offered for reason’s consideration. Rational processes can, therefore, only reach a conclusion based on some prior limit as to what will be deliberated.

Limitation presupposes a specifier of limits, a dictator of context. Whatever his name — censor, professor, elder, judge, priest, moderator, media, guardian, gate-keeper, etc. — he is always there whether he knows it or not. He might undertake his function openly and responsibly; he might innocently consider himself transparent unto whatever simply is; or he might believe his somehow exalted self already embodies all that is worthy of consideration.

Specifically Western science has never been any sort of gentlemanly discussion of what the evidence says, but more of a homicidal buzkashi over what evidence is admissible. With science having become the touchstone of what is to be believed, we may be sure that nothing so irritates the arbiter of society’s beliefs as a demonstrable fact loose in the choir. Though SFEcon originates in the economic mainstream’s causality, our objective has been to present economic orthodoxy as a self-sufficient system having no need of faith, reason, philosophical materialism’s departed saints, or the living body of clergy through whom their relics become audible. Such demonstrata of reality’s indifference to its celebrants have been provocative of reaction throughout history.

We note that inconvenient reports of moons orbiting Jupiter were not refuted by logic, but by the 17th Century Cardinals’ refusal to look into Galileo’s telescope and their damnation of those who did. Presumably Galileo said Demonstration is the essence of science because he knew that, once in evidence, demonstrations have a way of making their own case.

All but the most recent of mankind’s theurgical development centered on priestly invocations of the four seasons — these being vital to material survival because they foretold the optimal times for planting and harvesting. With Copernicus came a realization that the seasons’ precession was just something that was going to happen irrespective of priestly intercession; and there followed a considerable period of priestly wrath at the prospect of their unemployment, e.g.:

The view that the sun stands motionless at the center of the universe is foolish, philosophically false, and utterly heretical, because contrary to Holy Scripture.¹

1. SFEcon’s model of economic adjustment might well be a useful one; and

2. Orthodoxy’s implacable assertions of relevance over its objective demonstrata will likely deliver the efficiencies of capitalism into the service of our trading rivals’ command economies.