There is a strange and disturbing trend in academic circles, a tendency where the social sciences, perpetually insecure in their intellectual skin, attempt to cozy up to the hard sciences, to borrow their credibility as one might borrow an umbrella on a rainy day. This is no accident. The social sciences, in their incessant quest for legitimacy, have long sought to align themselves with the gravitas of their more “objective” cousins—disciplines such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering. But the results of these academic synergies have been, to put it kindly, a series of misunderstandings, many of which are insidious and dangerous, and which have led to a fractured and fragmented society.
When engineering helped usher in the Industrial Revolution, transforming society and the economy in ways that were almost unimaginable at the time, the social sciences, ever eager to keep pace, gave us “social engineering.” The idea was simple, even seductive: if you could design and construct buildings, bridges, and machines with such efficiency and precision, why not extend the same approach to designing society itself? Why not engineer communities and political systems with the same degree of rationality and order? It was an ambitious, even utopian vision, promising human progress at the speed of science. Yet, as history has proven, the results were disastrous. Instead of creating perfect societies, social engineering unleashed the specter of dysfunction and even totalitarianism, as the arrogant presumption that society could be mechanically constructed led to the construction of nightmares.
Along then came Darwin’s theory of evolution, like a divine revelation for the scientific community. The survival of the fittest, the unyielding law of nature that could be seen in everything from the natural world to the behavior of human beings, was too tempting for the social sciences to resist. Thus was born Social Darwinism—an ideology that took the principles of evolution and applied them to human society in the most grotesque ways. Just as nature ruthlessly weeds out the weak to make way for the strong, Social Darwinism justified the survival and procreation of the “fittest” human beings, while offering the same brutal fate to the “lesser” groups of humanity. This ideology provided intellectual support for imperialism, racism, and eugenics, casting human beings as mere pawns in an evolutionary game that had no place for the weak, the vulnerable, or anyone else who stood in the way of “progress,” and the state empowered to advance it.
But all of this would be nothing more than a historical footnote were it not for the arrival of another great scientific theory, one that would prove to be more enduring, and arguably even more problematic. Enter Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity, which posits that measurements of space, time, and motion depend on the observer’s relative state of motion. Since there’s no absolute reference frame, everything is relative to the observer’s point of view.
Perhaps you can see where this is leading.
Now, as it happens, relativity was not merely a scientific breakthrough; it was a worldview shift, a revolution in how we understand the universe. Yet, in the hands of the social sciences, it was warped into something altogether more dangerous: a license for moral and cultural relativity.
The social sciences, ever so eager to show how sophisticated and enlightened they had become, took Einstein’s breakthrough and decided to apply it to human culture. The result was cultural relativity, a concept that posits that no culture or its achievements are superior to another. The artistic triumphs of the Italian Renaissance, for example, are not objectively better than the rudimentary tribal masks of indigenous peoples. Both, according to cultural relativists, represent the pinnacle of artistic achievement for their respective cultures, and as such, they must be equally valued. To rank one culture above another was deemed not only ethnocentric but morally reprehensible.
But cultural relativism did not stop there. It quickly gave rise to moral relativism, a philosophical position that further eroded any understanding of right and wrong, good and bad. According to this view, moral truths are not universal or objective but are instead “relative” to the individual or the culture. There is no absolute right or wrong—only what is right for me, and what is right for you. The dangers of such a philosophy are, as one might imagine, profound. It allows for practices that, under any other ethical framework, would be considered barbaric, even savage, to be regarded as morally neutral, or even morally superior, simply because they are “cultural.”
Indeed, we are now living in a world where truth itself is under siege, and it is no exaggeration to say that Einstein’s theory of relativity, misapplied and abused, has become the intellectual scaffold for the phenomenon we now call “wokeness.” The consequences are evident everywhere. There is no longer a universal truth, no longer a reality to which we all must adhere. Instead, there is only “your truth” and “my truth.” You may see me as a human being, but if I see myself as a cat, well, that is my truth—and my truth is the only one that matters. Your perception, your understanding of reality, is irrelevant. What I tell you is what counts.
This is, of course, where relativity has taken us. What began as an elegant and revolutionary scientific theory about the nature of the universe has now, through a series of intellectual contortions, become a justification for ideological and moral chaos. The implications are enormous. The line between fact and fiction has been obliterated. If my truth contradicts your truth, so be it—what matters is that I believe my truth, and I am entitled to impose it upon you. What is objectively true has become irrelevant, as truth has become merely “relative to me.”
We have arrived at a place where reality is no longer grounded in anything concrete or verifiable, but rather in the whims of individual belief. The consequence of this, as we can already see in our current political and cultural climate, is a profound and growing disintegration of shared reality, and the rise of a new form of totalitarianism: not the kind that uses physical force, but the kind that uses language and identity itself to control the boundaries of acceptable discourse and along with it, thought and our perception of reality.
In the end, it is not Einstein who is to blame for this intellectual debacle, but the misuse of his work by those who have twisted it to serve their own agendas. The social sciences, in their desperate need to justify themselves, have taken the elegant precision of Einstein’s theory and turned it into a grotesque distortion that undermines both truth and reality itself. Relativity, in their hands, has become the refuge of the intellectually lazy and the morally bankrupt—a shield behind which the self-righteous can hide their incoherence and their inability to grapple with objective truth.
In the long run, the legacy of this distortion may well be a society increasingly fractured, increasingly incapable of distinguishing fact from fantasy, and increasingly vulnerable to those who would manipulate the “truth” for their own gain. You wonder why we are so divided? It’s because we don’t even share the same reality anymore, much less the same values. And all this because we, in our ignorance, decided to follow a path paved with the very same intellectual hubris that began with the social engineering of the past.
