expansions
misc.
Linked to from: n_miscGlossary.php.
scientism
Racism, also called racialism, is the belief that humans can be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called races; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others.
While all psychological constructs must have biological correlates, and all biological constructs must have psychological correlates, neither of these relationships is mechanically fixed. Primordial and individual inheritance can only meet its drive to survive through ontogeny adapting to the physical and cultural feedback of its environment. Biological structures then provide a 'plastic' substrate, enabling experience, mutatis mutandis, to be iteratively processed and recursively stored.
Assumptions are encoded by a society in the language of it's culture, and are fundamental to its reasoning. When ideas and actions align with this they appear self-evident and reasonable to those within it. When they do not they appear false, inconsequential, or amateurish. This elementary mechanism hides, for instance, the fallacies of its self-justifying circular logic, demanding instead that any alternative to it not only be reasonable but beyond doubt — whether or not that doubt is itself reasonable.
Eugenics promotes itself as the science of racism, but is actually simply scientism. A racist analysis of society, especially within cultures built on racist assumptions, gives the impression of being a proof for racist beliefs. It makes the beliefs appear reasoned by hiding its circular logic.
Science is an elementary practice; scientism is a fundamentalist belief.