Rietdijk in Eight Pages

C.W. Rietdijk, D. Sc.

1. Current religion substituted God by Man as He is. It lacks vision

Current (Western) religion is no longer about God, the hereafter or My Country, but is all about Man as He is. (Partially because he should continuously be humoured as a consumer, and partially because “projections into the supernatural” have been withdrawn more and more as the latter became less and less credible. And, of course, there is much longing for “solidarity”.) Further, chance is felt to dominate our destinies, whereas progress is deemed an illusion, just as objective truth and substantial goodness. Postmodernism in a broad sense became so pervasive that hardly anyone is still truly interested in major evolutions or coherence. The here-and-now and the incidental prevail. American sociologist I.L. Horowitz and his Dutch colleague A.C. Zijderveld argued that something similar even happened to sociology. They are right: no new general theories, no explanations, for example, of major phenomena like sexual taboos or political correctness.We can rather generally say that the centres of non-beta thinking – philosophy and sociology – to all appearance are now unconsciously attuned to evading everything vital and potentially disturbing, this embodying the latest variant of (inner) censorship and conformism in a long history. They indeed fail in focusing on the essential, such as the coherence of the world, the functioning of man as a natural phenomenon, evolution, the genetic quality of man, progress, arguments leading to rational values, and transforming the energy of strivings and frustrations into instruments for rationally managing destiny. (By the way, even theoretical physics abandoned looking for understandable models of reality.) Philosophy largely became verbiage about “the existential”, “being”, “language” and “mock problems”, whereas sociology dwarfed to details-mongering and methodology.
        What remains as the purposes of life in the above climate is consuming, cosily adjusting to the others and, therefore, conformist belonging. Correspondingly, of course, we see that thinking elites hardly exude any hopeful expectation anymore… 2. Present-day taboos and unreason serve power and vested interests, just as they used to

Accordingly, public discussion is superficial and will refer to things like sports, pensions or tax problems, real or imaginary discrimination, or stars. Cheap amusement and the invitation to consume are everywhere now. Hardly anyone seems interested in what – in our scientific age – could substitute the long-lasting motivations of existence and inspiration going with the old-time beliefs.
        At the same time modern (Western) religion, in which Man is deemed well-nigh “elevated” and inviolable (apart from an individual’s actual qualities), rather than his being considered a very imperfect product of evolution, is associated with and implies irrational taboos, just as its predecessors. We mention some major forbidden ideas that are contrary to the new orthodoxy:
(a) Man as he is can be improved genetically by means of expert manipulation and eugenic selection; in view of the “quality” of history, this is long overdue;
(b) Most long-lasting abuses and irrationalities in modern society do not stem from coincidence; neither are they unintended corollaries of well-meant policies. On the contrary, they will or used to result from the same serious human failings and inferiorities which in the past manifested themselves even more openly and crudely. For example, in the shape of corruptly serving special interests, persecutions, wars, censorship, exploitation and slavery. In modern times superstitions, egoism, manipulation and taboo merely will appear in more veiled ways: ideologically or bureaucratically disguised. That is, the quality of man as he is – his genes included – is only so-so;
(c) Dominating egalitarianism (such as political correctness), multiculturalism, moral and cultural relativism constitute specimens of such ideologically disguised humouring of vested interests, precisely as former “orthodoxies” and ideological conventions were. Think of redistribution, subsidy and emancipation bureaucracies and leftist parties that canvass for the votes of the “disadvantaged”, such as lowly-educated and low-IQ immigrants. (In this context also think of the pronouncement: “Nationalism is an instrument for making the many exert themselves for the sake of the few”. Currently prevailing “progressive” ideology is not very different: the bureaucracies, ideologists and various moral and genetic rearguards thrive.)
Further realize that egalitarianism and relativism are mutually closely related and that the latter devalues truth, arguments and human quality, and frees evil and evil-doers from their stigma. Many have an interest in this.
        Note that both “hallowing” man and accepting as positive most or all deeper intentions of the powers that be – as evidence to the contrary, compare the tabooing of (a), (b) and (c) above – also stimulate in the masses feelings of safety, belonging and having something to hold on to, which co-explains the persistency of also modern secularised religion.

3. Unconscious conspiracies – serving interests ideologically – are of all time The Greeks of Antiquity believed for many ages that the gods lived on Mount Olympus. Still, they never took a look there. Clearly, their leaders were not very firmly convinced that they would actually find them there, but did “as if”. This (the gods) can indeed be called a tacit or unconscious conspiracy to keep up the existing order.
        Present times too show similar “collective acceptance” of the implausible or the dubious, of which the truth or justness is posited or that is indeed tolerated as “concomitant of positive intentions”, but actually is ideological superstition for the sake of powerful groups.
        For example, think of the hyper-complication of juridical procedures on which lawyers and others thrive, or of the circumstance that hardly ever one publicly doubts the value of work of Karel Appel or Barnett Newman, or of unintelligible poems (all of which undermine a coherent world view).Or think of mixed-ability teaching that in many countries is supported by the elites, and that represents and emphasizes both egalitarianism and anti-intellectualism.

4. The antithesis of “the red thread in history” and opposition against it defines the main dynamics in society, as one coherent process of evolution

Rietdijk investigates the relation of on the one side the earlier-mentioned modern superstitions and taboos such as spoken of under 2., and on the other side the gods on Mount Olympus. He then comes to a simple and coherent theory in which such superstitions and taboos, collective repressions and the “religion of Man” discussed above all find their logical places. A major part therein is played by clearly indicated vested interests which, within this scope, also strongly co-define what ideas or ideologies will dominate.
        Essential in such a theory is the red thread in history: a gradual increase as regards discoveries by, and sophistication and applications of, reason (intelligence), and a related rationalization of the value system (more enlightened ethics) as well as a less chaotic, more coherent emotional life of at least various spiritual elites. It is revealing that sociology did not earlier hit upon this vital, simple and obvious idea.
        As appeared especially clearly in the era of Enlightenment and the French revolution, by no means everyone has an interest in the red thread. For example, nobility and the clergy did not have. Now the essence of Rietdijk’s theory on society and culture is that the main dynamics in such society is defined by the antithesis and struggle between those who have an interest in a continuing evolution via the red thread and those who, on the contrary, precisely thrive on convention, the irrational, censorship and more generally the unenlightened (compare nobility and clergy). Formerly, the anti-forces used to oppose and resist openly by means of violence, suppression, censorship, and the stimulation of anxiety, whereas in modern times they will do so more indirectly, disguisedly, such as via ideology. For example, by undermining reason and rational values via relativism, by anti-intellectualistic (“progressive”) educational reforms and by pushing (“modern”, “abstract”) schools of art that “disorganize” reason, good and evil, and aesthetic values: under is no longer under, and above no longer above; subjective interpretations and incoherence dominate. In sum, current anti-reason and anti-progress forces do no longer need jails and open censorship: they use relativism and the idea of an incoherent world.

5. The new theory substitutes ad-hoc explanations; mainstream sociology conformed to dominating social interests (also by evading everything controversial) Rietdijk sees it as the strongest aspect of his theory that it coherently explains so many phenomena from very few basic facts. For example, think of anti-intellectualistic educational reforms, sexually repressive morals [that constitute(d) censorship as to the free expression of vital instincts and emotions, just as that with respect to freedom of speech did as regards the free expression of thought], irrational “modern” art, and anti-Semitism. (Note that Jews played an important part in red-thread evolution in the latest hundred and fifty years.)
        Take notice of the connection between on the one side historical “unconscious conspiracies” around Greek gods, nationalistic or communist ideology, and religious orthodoxies that fostered and exploited guilt feelings and submission, and on the other side modern ideological manipulation around education, relativism, sexuality and “abstract” art. Their common element is their anti-red thread nature.
        All these vital matters are ignored or repressed by mainstream social science. Those who do so share guilt. Also think here of a much-heard excuse as a reaction to criticism such as expressed on this page and website: “For these things one cannot blame parliaments, heads of state, the media, prominent intellectuals and the rest of the establishment; they are not the culprits”. Well, who are then? Why our leaders don’t feel outraged at the release of a recidivist even after his twentieth offence, or at families abusing their children, and psychopaths, not being prevented from (additional) procreation? Why do they accept such consequences of our secularised, man-worshipping and relativistic religion (that at the same time serves the “help industry”)?

6. Substituting a paradigm: from chance and fuzziness to coherent determinism

Rietdijk’s thinking as a physicist lends major additional support to his socio-cultural theory. Both domains are currently dominated by the R(elativism)U(ncertainty) paradigm as a starting point: chance, incoherence, indeterminism and man not acting according to natural law (“free will”). That is: essential fuzziness, troubled waters.
        Rietdijk made a fundamental step in the direction of the substitution of such starting point (paradigm) by giving four demonstrations in the physical professional journals of the correctness of a conjecture earlier expressed by Einstein. That is, that the Special theory of relativity implies that future and past exist as realistically as the present we experience here and now: the idea of a realistic four-dimensional block universe, defined as precisely as, say, our personal past or present and having the dimensions length, width, height and time. Additionally, Rietdijk also proved in four different ways that the existing future – which is beyond our horizon of experience – to some degree also influences, co-defines, our present, similarly to how the past does so even more radically causally. These eight demonstrations have important consequences:
(a) “Fundamental uncertainty” in quantum-mechanics appears to be wrong; Einstein’s “hidden variables” indeed exist;
(b) The world – the future included – is defined to detail (four-dimensional reality simply exists): not uncertain or fuzzy, not coincidental, not subjective and not relative. And, probably, defined even by laws that demonstrate and effect order and coherence, not only as causes but as regards their results too. That is, Einstein’s “God does not play dice” can be expected to hold not merely for micro-particles but also for the destinies of individuals and for evolution. The above-mentioned RU paradigm, therefore, has to be substituted by an opposite one: the C(oherence)T(ransparency) paradigm.This cannot happen without strong resistance being encountered, for everyone who wants to hide or disguisedly manipulate something needs fuzziness and troubled waters: from subjectivist philosophy up to and including an emphasis on uncertainty, chance and the anxiety that will often be associated.
        Accordingly, Rietdijk’s work is not very popular: neither the “inviolable” man of current secularised and humanised religion, nor conformist and details-mongering social science, nor ideological manipulators unconsciously conspiring for the benefit of the powers that be, nor fuzzy philosophers using hollow verbiage (“alienation”, “Being”, “emptiness”, “Existential Anxiety”, “Language”,…), nor new-clothes-of-the-emperor kinds of artists are very fond of exposing explanations, straightforward theories and coherent models.
        Small wonder, therefore, that also his eight physical demonstrations – seven of which even remained unchallenged, let alone their being refuted –, that threaten the RU paradigm, hitherto did not draw much attention; however, see on internet (Google):
“Rietdijk-Putnam-Penrose argument”
and
“Andromeda Paradox”.7. Rationalism and the paradigms on the one side, and our direct emotional experience on the other

How do the RU-CT antithesis and corresponding theory reflect in our direct situation in life? We address some major points:a) The RU anti-rationalists emanate:
“The world is incoherent, man is irrational, values are relative and (therefore) progress is an illusion, let alone its realization by rational thinking and action.” (Think of the message of subjectivist philosophy and incoherent art.) b) The rationalistic CT people essentially say:
(i) Rational values also amount to the thesis that optimising total well-being is arguably more desirable than all other things, such as “the honour of my country”, convention, “chastity”,… (For arguments see for example my The Scientifization of Culture.)
(ii) Evolution should as much as possible be brought under the control of science. Within this scope, inter alia, individuals’ competing for power over others should highly be transformed into rational cooperation as to striving after power over destiny.c) For me personally, the main reason why I did not conform but remained critical of dominating tendencies is that in my psyche on the one side instincts and “biological strivings” such as about sex and “personal growth”, and on the other side my experiencing the elevated, such as beauty and quality in general, are closely connected, mutually allied.
        Quite to the contrary, in the RU, incoherence and taboo ambiance, for example, sex is associated with “the lower instincts”, aggression, frustration, the irrational and “mystery” rather than with such quality and elevation. In my psyche, Freud’s Id and Super-ego are largely allies, whereas in conventional culture they will be rather contrasting. The unconscious purposes and beneficiaries of the latter are not hard to find: making man basically divided in himself (incoherent) and thus causing him to lack the inner strength and conviction to stand alone as an independent thinker.
        Also for this reason the RU ambiance is vital as to the wielding of irrational power.d) The unsound incoherence as to emotional instincts and the elevated (conscience) discussed above partly joins with an equally unsound one with respect to “left” and “right”. Both antitheses should be re-ordered and be made more consistent in coherence with the basic antithesis of 4. above: reason, progress etcetera versus the unenlightened such as dogma as well as relativism and uncertainty.
        By such re-ordering, the traditional right (convention, myth, anti-rationalism,…) and current “New Left” (relativism, incoherent art, accepting man as he is, political correctness,…) both appear on the conservative, unenlightened and anti-red-thread side. On the other hand, emphasizing techno-science, human (genetic) quality, rational values and transparency figure on the progressive side.

8. Toward a scientific motivation of existence that restores meaning and hope

The foregoing (Sect. 6.) means that “influences” from past and future (that, in a four-dimensional frame of existence, should be considered as “static” dependence, relations or connections) jointly can embody feedback interactions between causes and their effects. Such influences, separately or combinedly, obey four-dimensional natural laws that imply (more) order, patterns and symmetries in the four-dimensional network (lattice) of events. This reduces chance and the chaotic even more radically than nineteenth-century local-causal deterministic billiard-ball physics did, that did not know of super-local coherence, “influences” and patterns, and of feedbacks between causes and effects in four-dimensional space co-enforcing such patterns and coherence. It did neither know of them with respect to particles, nor as to what people do and experience within the scope of their destinies.
        In this context, Rietdijk goes into the paranormal and the religious, with which his super-rationalism and four-dimensional natural laws – that define events and processes – contrast much less than local reductionism and mainstream rationalism do.
        In his scientifically based concept, meaning and hope find their places via the idea of progress – that is essential within the scope of the red thread – and via progressive scientific research into the role of man and consciousness in four-dimensional reality, a role that could be meaningful and enduring. Massive research into out-of-the-body and near-death experiences could be very relevant here, just as further investigating consciousness and the brain.

9. On other concrete subjects of Rietdijk’s physical work Apart from the demonstrations of realistic four-dimensionality and of the appearance of retroactive influences from the future there are two main focuses in Rietdijk’s physical research:I  Research into concrete consequences of such proofs as to various phenomena, a number of the unsolved ones among which appears to be explainable from the four-dimensional perspective. Among them are:
(a) Non-local phenomena such as in the paradox of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen; they become understandable by means of a new four-dimensional action metric;
(b) Einstein’s hidden variables, that precisely consist of the retroactive influences;
(c) Wave-particle “duality” in quantum-mechanics, that can be understood from such same action metric.The famous quantum of action h

introduced by Planck appears in Rietdijk’s theory as a realistic four-dimensional “atom of the entity `occurring’”, from which all (four-dimensional) processes of nature have been “constructed” or built up. Among such processes is the existence in time of all micro-particles. Subsequently, the realistically four-dimensional point of view allows one to construct a “Mendelejev scheme” of those particles, in which the existence in time of each kind of particle separately appears as a corresponding four-dimensional “lattice” of action quanta.
        Such construction of (the existence in time of) particles from action quanta appears to throw an explaining light on three of the four fundamental forces of nature (strong, weak and electromagnetic) and, moreover, it also allows one to predict the ratio of the proton and electron masses within a margin of 6 percent.
        Further, the four-dimensional point of view appears to essentially solve the well-known controversy between Einstein (determinism and observation-independent reality) and Bohr (the observational set-up can influence measurement results, and micro-processes cannot be explained by mere local influences and reductionism: they constitute wholes).II  In the second place, a number of Rietdijk’s papers on physics deals with subjects other than realistic four-dimensionality, such as a new theory of electromagnetic attraction and repulsion, an explanation of the formula governing quantum-mechanical probability distribution, some proposed experiments aiming at better demonstrating the appearance of action quanta and retroactive influences and, last but not least, a theory of consciousness which, however, makes use of realistic four-dimensionality. This theory is in the process of being published.More about this point 9.can be found in:
Four-dimensional Reality and its Coherence – an outline of Rietdijk’s theory on physics.
This is also in the process of being published in print.Postscript

10. What amazes me most(1) Both proponents and opponents of my work seldom go into the concrete explanations, theories and arguments that constitute its substance, but seem to be primarily interested in my supporting the Enlightenment – in which I am far from original – and eugenics, and also in my taking “rightist” views as regards education and crime-fighting, and my rejecting most of the spirit of the nineteen-sixties…
        In short, some of my standpoints seem to eclipse my real scientific work in their minds. This virtually amounts to evading substantial discussion, a phenomenon that appears far more generally, life and our public debate becoming more commercial, conformist, fleeting and noncommittal. It also contains that with respect to most core problems – sex, death, lying politicians, human genetic quality, social inequality and problem groups, Third-World immigration, progress, procreation, a possible hereafter,… – the most essential aspects will be ignored, as we elucidated in other parts of this website. Such silence embodies modern censorship.(2) Conformism among Western intelligentsia became so extreme that not even one percent advocates eugenics or publicly ridicules new-clothes-of-the-emperor phenomena such as Cobra, Jackson Pollock or Finnegan’s Wake.(3) The moral dimension continues to be very poor; multi-offenders are set at their fellow men time and again… Superficiality attained a level at which relativists and postmodernists say that values are relative but at the same time will condemn the Holocaust.(4) The circumstance that “progressive” educational reforms are not laughed out of the room, and remain generally unrecognised as one more variant of anti-intellectualistic and anti-enlightened ideology, in spite of their practical failure being self-evident:
a) The comprehensive material that should be learned for examinations is not systematically explained and studied from neatly arranged and coherent books, that also contain sufficient exercise material, but for the most part is taught more indirectly and unsystematically (projects, “discover-it-by-yourself”,…). Consequences: time-wasting, no line in history, no systematic knowledge of and insight into natural science and mathematics, no grammar and wordlists with foreign languages,…
b) Teachers have to explain many things separately to various groups and individuals. Again: much waste of time and no silence in the class for allowing real study and thought.
c) “Progressives” want more practical skills and competences, but at the same time largely abolished technical schools. Small wonder that the suspicion arises that their (unconscious, ideological) intentions are quite different from what they say: simple reactionary anti-intellectualism.

(5) Utopia – even if based on techno-science and rational values rather than the dogmas and ideologies of the past – is not very popular. I suggest that, apart from unfavourable earlier experiences, the explanation is this:
We inherited from the jungle and survival of the fittest the drive to outstrip others and to have power over them. (This rather much contrasts with optimising the public good by rational values, integer cooperation and more and more power over destiny via intelligence.) Well, this state of matters causes many to thrive basically on others’ shortcomings and misfortune, and on power over them: they cannot do without these. This, then, does not contribute to their enthusiasm about any rational Utopia. Within this scope, much sympathy for unenlightened ideas (from Heidegger’s anti-technology and verbiage to egalitarianism) among intellectuals probably stems from rancour towards successful innovators. Final question:If my opponents had arguments, why didn’t they produce them?Read more articles by Wim Rietdijk.