Arrested and Abstracted Development: A Species at the Crossroads

Chapter 5: Limits, Shortcomings, Results and Consequences of Scientific Culture

Chapter 5 argues that scientific culture magnifies the same historical assumptions that have shaped human development since its beginnings—collective organization, abstract understanding, externalized identity, and managing life by controlling external conditions. By institutionalizing these assumptions in a vast socio‑cultural and technological superstructure, scientific culture deepens fragmentation, abstraction, and dissociation from lived experience. It reduces existence to a material universe, marginalizes the mind and inner mental life, and offers only fragmented models rather than a coherent framework for understanding human existence.

This produces loss of identity, orientation, and shared meaning, escalating mental instability, confusion, insecurity, and alienation. Socially, scientific culture intensifies competition, conflict, inequality, domination, and fragmentation. Ecologically, it accelerates environmental degradation by pushing human activity beyond natural limits. Education reinforces these patterns by training individuals to function within external structures rather than to understand and manage their own minds. The chapter concludes that scientific culture magnifies the limits and contradictions of the historical path, leaving individuals mentally underdeveloped and societies increasingly unstable, while threatening the natural foundations of human life