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That might just add the necessary amount of heedlessness that will keep humanity from solving this life-and-death problem and will therefore send civilization crashing. And you ask what harm it will do!

I doubt that I impressed the fellow. He clearly had no idea of the power of his profession, or of its responsibilities. He had not plumbed the depth of the good it could do; or the evil, either. I presume he merely looked at his profession as a way to make a living.

It is not just this one small claim and this one small bit of sleazy stupidity on the part of a news program that assails us.

Never in history has humanity faced a crisis so deep, so intense, so pervasive, and so multi-faceted. There have never, till now, been so many people on Earth, so dependent on a complex technology, so burdened by its flaws, and so likely to witness a complete breakdown of that technology in a matter of decades.

If we are to pull through, we must thread our way carefully through the rapids that lie ahead. At every step, we will be depending on our knowledge, grasp and understanding of science, of its potentialities and of its limitations. If we are careless and over-hasty, we may destroy ourselves through the misuse of science. If we are forethoughtful and knowledgeable, we may find salvation through the wise use of science.

Under these circumstances, what crime is greater than that of deliberately misteaching the public about science, of deliberately misleading them, of defrauding them, of feeding and stimulating their ignorance?

Folly and fakery have always been with us, to be sure, but it has never before been as dangerous as it is now; never in history have we been able to afford it less.

At any other time in history, we would be grateful to any hard-headed realist who undertook to expose knaves and rascals, and would applaud his courage. *

How much more must we express our gratitude and admiration to someone doing so now at this critical point in history.

Randi is one person who has the ability and the temperament for the job;—none better!

He has no academic credentials, and therefore no academic restrictions. He can call things as he sees them, and is not held back by professional politeness in discussing those scientists who not only fall for the paranormal, but promote it in their ignorance.

He does have a profession that is useful to his task. He is an accomplished professional magician and there is no trick or illusion that he is not aware of and prepared for—which is more than is true of those scientific innocents who, in dealing with fakery, are so eager to accept the surface appearance that they are easier to fool than children are (for children are, by nature, skeptical).

Randi has, at one time or another, assailed every wall and buttress of the vast Castle of Pseudoscience and has never pulled his punches. He has, for that reason, been called the "hitman" of the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (to which he and I both belong) and he doesn't completely deny the label.

Why should he? The practitioners of pseudoscientific fakery assail "conventional" science with every weapon of innuendo and falsehood they can think of, and demand that, in return, scientists be "open-minded." They may strike, in other words, but scientists must not return the blow, or even parry it.

Well, the hell with that! Randi strikes back and when the pseudo-scientists howl, he knows he has hit the mark.

In a nutshell: Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

Isaac Asimov

* * *

It is sad that it does take courage, for trying to snatch folly from the minds of those who have been victimized by it is often rather like trying to snatch a bone from a dog. If human beings didn't find nonsense so attractive, there'd be no problem, for as someone once said, "Were there fewer fools, knaves