Scientific fascism.

 If we translate fascism out of politics and into science, it wouldn’t be a single ideology or theory. It would be a mode of control over knowledge. In short: Scientific fascism is when authority replaces inquiry.

At its core, fascism in science emerges when a centralized power decides what is true, and dissent is treated not as part of the scientific process, but as a threat. Evidence still exists, experiments may still happen, but interpretation is no longer free. Conclusions are preselected, and data is forced to align with them. Instead of “test and revise,” the logic becomes “defend and enforce.”

One clear sign is dogmatism. Certain frameworks are treated as untouchable, not because they’ve survived falsification, but because questioning them risks reputational harm, loss of funding, or exclusion. The theory becomes an identity. Criticism is reframed as ignorance, heresy, or danger rather than engagement.

Another feature is institutional coercion. Journals, grant bodies, universities, and review boards quietly converge on acceptable narratives. This doesn’t require explicit conspiracy. Incentives do the work. Researchers learn what not to study, what not to say, and which questions will stall a career. Orthodoxy becomes self-policing.

There is also technocratic nationalism, where science serves power rather than truth. Research is shaped to justify policy, ideology, or economic interests. Outcomes are framed as “settled” prematurely because uncertainty is politically inconvenient. Complexity is flattened into slogans.

A subtler aspect is the erasure of the subject. Human experience, observer effects, or philosophical implications are dismissed outright, not argued against, but ruled out as illegitimate. Only one mode of knowing is allowed. Anything that doesn’t fit the sanctioned epistemology is labeled unscientific by definition.

Historically, we’ve seen this in extreme forms. There's Lysenkoism in the USSR, where genetics was outlawed because it conflicted with ideology. Also, Nazi racial “science,” where conclusions preceded experiments. But modern versions are usually quieter, bureaucratic, and sanitized.

Importantly, this is not the same as scientific consensus. Consensus emerges from open challenge and survives because it keeps working. Fascism in science emerges when challenge itself becomes unacceptable.

If questioning a claim threatens your legitimacy more than the claim itself, science has stopped being science. Healthy science tolerates uncertainty, welcomes heresy, and expects to be wrong eventually. Fascistic science demands loyalty to conclusions and treats doubt as disobedience.

Once scientific fascism takes hold, it no longer needs to argue. It administers.

Peer review shifts from evaluation to gatekeeping. Reviewers stop asking “is this coherent, novel, or testable?” and begin asking “does this align with what we already accept?” Papers that challenge foundational assumptions are rejected not for errors, but for being “out of scope,” “philosophical,” or “insufficiently grounded,” which in practice means insufficiently obedient. The language stays polite. The effect is absolute.

Funding mechanisms harden this further. When resources are scarce, conformity becomes survival. Researchers learn to pre-censor their questions. The most dangerous ideas are never written down, not because they are wrong, but because they are unplaceable. Over time, an entire generation is trained to confuse methodological rigor with ideological safety.

At this stage, science develops something like a priesthood. Credentials replace arguments. Authority is invoked implicitly rather than defended explicitly. A claim is treated as true because “we know this now,” even when what is actually meant is “we have decided not to reopen this.” The appeal to expertise becomes a shield against inquiry rather than a responsibility to it.

This is where language itself starts to change. Certain questions are framed as irresponsible. Certain hypotheses are labeled harmful, regressive, or dangerous before they are evaluated. Not ethically dangerous in the sense of misuse, but epistemically dangerous in the sense that they destabilize an established hierarchy of explanation.

The paradox is that this system often believes it is protecting science. It sees itself as defending rigor against chaos, safeguarding the public from misinformation, and preserving trust. And in a limited sense, it is right. Unchecked nonsense exists. Bad faith actors exist. But fascism always begins as protection. The line is crossed when power decides truth in advance and justifies it as stewardship.

The deepest casualty is not any single theory, but epistemic humility. When a field becomes convinced it has reached the correct level of explanation, it stops asking whether its assumptions are contingent, historical, or incomplete. This is especially visible in areas that touch consciousness, time, and observerhood, where foundational questions are dismissed as “already solved” while remaining conceptually unresolved.

A critical point is, that scientific fascism does not require false results. It can coexist with accurate models. What it suppresses is alternative ontologies. You are allowed to refine the map but not redraw it.

So, the system keeps producing answers, but fewer questions. Innovation becomes incremental. Revolutions are reframed as noise. Anything that suggests the observer might be structurally involved, rather than a passive recorder, is quietly excluded because it threatens the asymmetry between knower and known.

At that point, science becomes extremely powerful and strangely brittle. It can calculate, predict, and engineer with extraordinary precision, yet it becomes unable to reflect on its own foundations without defensiveness. The refusal to examine those foundations is not a flaw of intelligence, but of authority.

And that is the final marker:
when science treats challenges to its metaphysical assumptions as political acts rather than scientific ones, it has crossed into the very thing it once existed to prevent.