Modern physics, and science in general, is a fascinating example of gaslighting at a societal wide scale. People talk about the "laws of physics", ideas encoded in mathematics that can describe how the material world behaves, and yet we are supposed to believe that everything is physical regardless?
Taking a step back, the idea of a higher world governing a lower world is found in Plato's idea of Ideals, or Forms. The details differ between Plato's account and ours, for instance he thought that even objects themselves were reflections of a more abstract and eternal form, that various chairs for instance were instantiations of the one "true" chair, something that modern science doesn't claim at all because that aspect of Plato's theory hinges on essence, something that our postmodern world largely does away with, but regardless, the fundamental split between a higher world and a lower world remains.
Except that in the case of modern science, we are supposed to study the higher world of mathematical structures, while denying that it is a higher world. Scientists say that they are merely "describing" how the material world behaves, not prescribing it, but it doesn't resolve a really basic set of questions: if everything is supposed to be material, what are ideas then? What are theories? What are the laws of physics? What is language?
You cannot say that they don't exist, because it would mean that science itself doesn't exist! But if you said that they weren't physical, then you would be admitting that there is a higher world, or at least another plane of Reality like what occultists do, which would be getting into strange woo woo territory which science deems to be unrigorous (because it can't be described with mathematics). So in practice what do scientists say? In my experience, most of them avoid the question altogether. 1 They even have a rationalization for that: "We do science not metaphysics"!
Anyone who knows the history of how science came about knows this is preposterous. science started out as a branch of philosophy called 'natural philosophy', because it was well understood that you cannot study how nature behaves—'physics' original meant 'the study of nature'—without pondering about the structure of Reality Itself. The idea that you can build accurate models of Reality, what science does, without understanding Reality itself is itself a metaphysical claim! It presupposes that the tools that science uses, including the mind, have enough of a correspondence with Reality that our models can be accurate without getting down to the metaphysical foundations. But how would we know that?
The Gnostics for instance view the mind as fundamentally untrustworthy when it comes to the Higher nature of Reality, which is why they use the fancy word 'gnosis' to denote a direct access to Truth, unmediated by the usual distortions of our senses and the knowledge that our mind deals with. If the Gnostics are correct, then one cannot simply be empirical about Reality and endeavor to uncover It through observation and experimentation, because the mind, and all of the subsequent tools that it builds, can only show you a partial reflection of Reality. Not just a limited slice of It, but a representation of what it is, which betrays its true nature.
This doesn't mean that you cannot do science, because evidently it has been able to channel empirical power and reliable explanations in some contexts, but it means that science, and all of the tools in empiricism in general, can never show you Reality-as-it-is, only representations of it. 2
But how do you know whether the Gnostics or the modern scientists are correct without metaphysics? You can't, because you can't escape Reality, even if you "just" want to build models of it—which is already quite a preponderous idea, the idea of pursuing utility without truth, because it creates a world with much power but devoid of truth, and its related qualities such as love and wisdom.
What (modern) science does is to take for granted various metaphysical assumptions, such as the idea of an externally verifiable world which we can understand through our mind, namely through causality and empiricism. But it never questions what any of those things are, and the extent to which they hold: what 'externally verifiable' means, what the mind is (they use the word 'brain' to make it sound more reasonable, but in fact there is a great deal of idealism even in modern science), and where causality comes from and why it would hold up.
Even with all of this, you can still derive useful models as I have mentioned, but the real gaslighting happens when scientists then tell us that science is simply True. The game that many of them play is that they present science as a pure and noble pursuit of Truth to the large public, but then when an intelligent person starts to poke the foundations of their worldview (and their job), they then start presenting science as a humble pursuit of models of Reality, because Its real nature cannot be known. This double-faced nature allows them to reap all of the worldly benefits from commanding the domineering worldview in our times, while shielding themselves from any accusation of intellectual and epistemic dishonesty against discerning people. Convenient.
The denial of metaphysics then has many other consequences, as mentioned in the article I linked in the beginning about the great gaslighting, because the purely "material" world that modern science describes is utterly devoid of meaning.
What is deemed "true" within modern science is what can be described mathematically—ironically a very idealist (rather than materialist) criterion—which means that meaning cannot exist in any ... meaningful way, besides our own subjective and emotional (and therefore flawed in the eyes of science) attempts at it.
This is rather problematic because it means that science itself is a meaningless endeavor. Sure, we can get down to the "truth" (within its paradigm) and burn down the falsehoods of our time, but why exactly? Why make society and science better? Why perpetuate existence on this planet? Happiness is not a valid justification. Nor is love, because human beings just like one another to have sex and form tribes to survive better and to perpetuate the species. Nor is the idea that "intelligence" itself is valid, because that's also a subjective interpretation of life. Hence, the narrative of meaninglessness.
It's impossible to answer the question of meaning from within the modern world, which is why the latter is bound to disappear sooner or later. 3 Not that meaning is an intellectual endeavor, it's really something you experience and live out in your life, but the fact that people turn to the mind is already indicative of the impossibility for someone locked in that paradigm to escape it.
This is what happens when your metaphysics is sloppy. Because metaphysics deals with the foundation of Reality, denying its existence means turning a blind eye to fundamental aspects of Reality. Just like someone who pretends that they never get angry, and who ends up being controlled by subtle (or sometimes not so subtle at all) forms of anger, so then a society which pretends that its narrow set of assumptions are simply True without examining them ends up living inside the cage that it builds.
In this regard, the Gnostics were right. The mind, by itself, is unable to access key aspects of Reality, no matter how clever its methods are. This is why we live in a world with very powerful technology, but where people are so lacking in conscious qualities in their lives: love, curiosity, meaning, freedom, courage, patience and dilligence, just to name a few.
A sane society would recognize its blindspots and adjust its picture of Reality accordingly. An insane society doubles down on its representations, which it views as the Absolute Truth to begin with, no matter how many problems show up. Thus all of the alienation that we see in our world becomes even more evidence that we need to do more science! Look at all of those people turning to Astrology, or the Law of Attraction, or going back to religions, or weird forms of 'quantum' mysticism. All of this delusion happens because we are not being scientific enough!
I'm not the biggest fan of Carl Jung's work 4, but his fundamental idea of the shadow becomes more and more true as we witness large amounts of people in utter denial of what is missing in their life, continuing to double down on failed strategies. We cannot deny metaphysics because human beings have an innate desire to understand Reality, and belong to something greater than themselves.
If that need is denied, by pretending that there is no higher world for instance, nothing that mathematics cannot describe, it will re-express itself in far more problematic ways, namely the weird cults and pseudo-religions 5 that have been popping up, and which slowly but surely atomize our social reality even further, making people more unbalanced and unable to live well with one another. Repression always creates more fragmentation, and at a societal level this becomes even more obvious, provided that we do not have stakes in the narrative war which shatters our mind.
1 There is another view which attempts to view ideas as "patterns that encode information within matter", which tries once again to salvage naive materialism, but I don't think it really holds up because it once again doesn't answer the question—what is information then?—but this is for another piece, it's an entire can of worms.
2 I'm framing this in somewhat-Kantian terms, more precisely in how Darren Allen would phrase it in his work dealing with Self and Unself, and I'm sure that Gnostics had different terms and frames on it, but I think that the fundamental idea is the same: the mind doesn't give us Reality, but representations of it.
3 And societal collapse is another reason why.
4 Not because I have anything to say about the ideas themselves, because I simply haven't had time to engage with them. But mainly because they seem to attract the wrong crowd. People who intellectualize everything shouldn't turn to Jung, they should really become more effective at meeting their basic needs in life and become more balanced, but in practice they are very attracted to his ideas, or at least, the aesthetic of it, and become lopsided.
5 And conspiracy theories
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Science Plato Gnosticism Occultism
2026-04-04