In an Age Devoid of Reason, Playing Dumb and Staying Silent Have Become the Fashion

Yesterday in Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao I read a report that Jameel, chair of the scientific advisory group of the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics Consortium, had resigned.

Although Jameel would not state his reason openly, in a May 13 op-ed for The New York Times summarizing India's pandemic response he had noted that evidence-based decisions by scientists faced entrenched resistance.

In fact, early in the pandemic a number of virologists and medical experts chose to withdraw and stay silent. I recall the first to fade from the news were some German virologists, for online abuse had grown beyond what they could bear, and they realized they could not change reality.

In the early pandemic I wrote about 100,000 characters and raised my voice to warn the world. My writing spread widely; I saw foreign journalists quoting my data and ideas when interviewing national leaders, and TV hosts discussing me. My official account once gained over 40,000 followers in a single day.

Yet my appeals fell on deaf ears. I was astonished by how stubbornly the real world resisted rational voices. So when the pandemic became unstoppable, I too chose silence. After saving my data, I removed all my articles of that period from the internet, joined the silent majority, and returned to cancer research.

I knew that speaking out then would not help and might bring fatal trouble. If anything happened to me, my family and many patients would suffer. The rational move is to find a safe harbor before the storm. My alertness is high; when I smelled anti-intellectualism in the air, I knew we had entered an era of chaos. Even Einstein could only gaze helplessly then; how much less can we.

A rational person should recognize that the real world does not run rationally. There are rational individuals, but no rational groups; independent thinking is too rare for most people.

The world's direction is set by the majority. Einstein mercilessly criticized human ignorance, noting the ignorant were too numerous to ignore. I see it differently: human intelligence is limited; Einsteins are one in a million, so the world's course depends on the overall quality of the population.

In every era and country, many intellectuals have been crusaded against and slaughtered by an uninformed public. Over time, intellectuals worldwide have learned to play the fool and stay silent in fervent times.

In the preface to Wang Xiaobo's The Silent Majority: 'If, in some field, the modest and reasonable think it too difficult and ambiguous and refuse to speak, then those who speak will inevitably be the shallow and arrogant.' When professionals fall silent, the half-baked take the stage. The public is pitiable; little they read is truthful.

I rarely read popular web writing or most news; some are blatant lies for gain, others foolish bilge from ignorant authors unaware of their own ignorance. Though reading them wastes life, they have a market and breed a stubborn force against reason.

Fundamentally, this is invisible natural law at work. When a species grows too numerous, catastrophe follows to cut its numbers and restore balance.

Malthus said that when overpopulation outstrips resources, plague and war cut the population; if those fail, famine follows. The world's disorders are tied to nature's silent population control. So social irrationality is normal; if everyone were rational, we would outgrow the Earth's carrying capacity.