Equally important, Crichton wants to tear away the curtain of sanctimoniousness that hides the self-serving nature of the main “green” organizations. Their disregard for science and truth already imposes costs on people, with the heaviest costs falling on the poorest people. If the United States were ever so foolish as to embrace the “green” agenda in full, the result would be economic disaster of monumental proportions. Crichton accurately sees the radical greens as self-interested groups whose officers irresponsibly push fear and pseudoscience to drum up financial support.

When you put such an ambitious product in the hands of a bestselling novelist, you have the makings of a book with strong impact. That’s just what Michael Crichton delivers.

It’s important to bear in mind that while Crichton has made his career writing fast-paced “technothriller” novels, he has a strong scientific background that includes a medical degree from Harvard. Clearly, he has not lost the ability to think analytically about scientific claims. The greens’ incessant use of alarmist rhetoric, disinformation, and junk science has caused many scientists to speak up in protest. Crichton wants the general reading reading public to understand what scientists do and that environmentalists often play fast and loose with the scientific method.

The action in the novel centers around a fictitious (but very realistic) environmental organization called the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF) and its unpleasant, maniacal leader Nick Drake. NERF has been spending huge sums of money to covertly acquire some esoteric technology, a fact that comes to the attention of John Kenner, a cross between an MIT professor and a swashbuckling adventurer. Kenner gradually figures out what Drake is up to — the deliberate staging of environmental disasters, human casualties and all, for the purpose of hyping a big environmental conference and lawsuit NERF is planning. Kenner uses all his brains and guts to foil the plots.

Naturally, there is plenty of suspense, mystery, and action. What Crichton hopes is that readers won’t just go bouncing along with the plot, but will absorb some of the scientific information he frequently includes in the form of dialogues between Kenner and some environmental true believer. For example, Kenner responds to a flip comment by an environmental lawyer that Antarctica is melting due to global warming by printing out a list of scientific papers (all of them genuine) in which the researchers have found evidence for Antarctic cooling. The lawyer merely responds by saying that the studies were probably financed by the coal industry.

Kenner counterattacks by asking if the lawyer holds his views merely because his salary is paid by environmental groups. The lawyer becomes angry at the implication that he is just a paid flunky, and Kenner then bores in.

“Now you know how legitimate scientists feel when their integrity is impugned by slimy characterizations such as the one you just made. Sanjong and I gave you a careful, peer-reviewed interpretation of data. Made by several groups of scientists from several different countries. And your response was first to ignore it, and then to make an ad hominem attack.You didn’t answer the data. You didn’t provide counter evidence. You just smeared with innuendo.”

State of Fear is chock full of important lessons like that. Once he gets rolling, Crichton is like a guy who, now that he has his chain saw out, figures he might as well cut up not just the downed tree branch in his backyard, but all the rest of the dead wood around. He goes after lots of other environmental pseudo-issues (such as that power lines cause cancer) and emphasizes the high cost of some environmental policies (such as the resurgence of malaria since greens managed to have DDT banned). By the book’s end, there’s a big pile of sawdust that used to be the environmentalist thought-world.

Of course, the book has been blasted by the greens and big-government interventionists who don’t want to see one of their prize justifications for the expansion of the state called into question. Their ire alone is almost enough to recommend State of Fear. Crichton’s brief essay “Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous” (included as an appendix) is certainly enough to recommend it.

Sample this rarity — a best-seller that has something very important to say.

Turing was a mathematician, cryptographer, and pioneering computer scientist. He was good-looking, athletic, eccentric, and openly homosexual. In 1935, backed by John Maynard Keynes, Turing was elected a Fellow of King’s College, a remarkable achievement for so young a man. In 1936 he published a paper that immediately became a classic in mathematics and earned him an an invitation from John von Neumann to continue his studies at Princeton University. In 1938, having been awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics, Turing returned to Cambridge and was soon working at Bletchley Park, the famous British code-breaking “factory.” When the war ended, Turing moved to Manchester where the university created a special readership in the theory of computing for him.

In 1951 Turing began a homosexual relationship with a working-class youth. Returning home one evening, he found that his house had been burglarized. He reported the crime to the police and communicated his suspicion that the culprit was an associate of his gay friend. He confessed to his homosexual affair and was charged with “gross indecency,” a crime then punishable by a maximum of two years’ imprisonment. The judge, taking into account Turing’s intellectual distinction and social position, sentenced him to probation, “on the condition that he submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner.” In April 1952 he wrote to a friend, “I am both bound over for a year and obliged to take this organo-therapy for the same period. It is supposed to reduce sexual urge whilst it goes on, but one is supposed to return to normal when it is over. I hope they’re right.” Turing was never the same again. His body became feminized. He grew breasts.

Fatal Treatment for a Fictitious Disease

On June 8, 1954, Turing was found dead by his housekeeper, a partly eaten apple laced with cyanide next to his bed. At the inquest, the coroner ruled his death a suicide. Neither his homosexuality nor his psychiatric treatment was mentioned. The coroner said, “I am forced to the conclusion that this was a deliberate act. In a man of this type, one never knows what his mental processes are going to do next.” The verdict was “suicide while the balance of his mind was disturbed.” Even in death, psychiatry and the state stigmatized Turing as mad. The posthumous diagnosis of suicide as mental illness is the ritual degradation ceremony of our therapeutic age, much as the posthumous burning of the heretic’s corpse was the ritual degradation ceremony of an earlier theological age.

No one in Turing’s circle, himself included, was able or willing to transcend the psychiatric zeitgeist: Homoerotic behavior and self-determined death are self-evident symptoms of mental illness, it argues, requiring and justifying coercive medical-psychiatric treatment. Turing’s psychiatrist, Dr. Frank M. Greenbaum, vehemently rejected the coroner’s diagnosis, though not by contesting the claims that engaging in homosexual conduct and self-killing are evidence of diseases curable by doctors. “There is not the slightest doubt to me that Alan died by an accident,” declared Greenbaum.

In 1967 the UK decriminalized homosexuality. Overnight it ceased to be a disease in England but not the United States, where for six more years it remained both a crime and a “treatable disease.”

Turing’s biographer, Andrew Hodges, notes that Turing did not consider his homosexuality a disease, a crime, or a shameful condition. He suggests that Turing opted for medical treatment rather than a brief period of imprisonment because he feared that a criminal conviction would be fatal for his career. Countless of Turing’s gay contemporaries at Cambridge and in London—Wittgenstein, Keynes, Lytton Strachey, many of the Apostles and Bloomsburys—sensibly stayed away from psychiatrists. Many famous people—Gandhi, Russell, and Nehru—spent time in prison, though, and went on to do memorable work. This is not true for people imprisoned in mental hospitals. After the psychiatric degraders finish their job, the “patient” is dead—if not biologically then socially.

Psychiatric destruction often begins with psychiatric self-destruction, the denominated patient believing the psychiatrist’s self-deceptions about nonexisting diseases and their damaging treatments. “The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society,” declared Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), “is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.” Let us not forget that the power of science is limited to informing and misinforming. It does not have the power to coerce. In contrast, power to coerce is the very essence of psychiatric pseudoscience allied with the state. Psychiatrists regularly characterize their power to coerce as “suicide prevention.” The opposite is often the case.

The original function of psychiatry—which is approximately 300 years old—was penological: The psychiatrist stigmatized persons as “mad,” deprived them of liberty, and assaulted them with chemical and physical interventions. A little more than 100 years ago individuals began to seek psychiatric help for their own problems. As a result, many people who entrusted themselves to the care of psychiatrists became entrapped in the machinery of punitive mad-doctoring, dramatically portrayed in Ken Kesey’s best-selling novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the film based on it. The recent film Changeling presents a real-life example.

So does Alan Turing’s psychiatric undoing.

Psychiatry: Trap, Not Treatment

The identification of psychiatry with medical healing and humane helpfulness is factually false and morally deceptive, concealing an existential trap with untold-of potentialities for injury and death for the entrapped. More successfully than ever, the modern “biological” psychiatrist misrepresents his profession as based on biological science and medical discovery, while more than ever it is based on pseudoscience and therapeutic deception.

The persecution of homosexuals is paradigmatic of the history of psychiatry’s monumental blunders and brutalities and of its policy of never acknowledging nor apologizing for them. Instead, organized psychiatry intensifies the celebration of its founding quack, Benjamin Rush (1746–1813). Declared Rush, “I have selected those two symptoms [murder and theft] of this disease [crime] (for they are not vices) from its other morbid effects, in order to rescue persons affected with them from the arm of the law, and render them the subjects of the kind and lenient hand of medicine.” What did Rush mean when he spoke of medical kindness and lenience? Lamenting the “excess of the passion for liberty inflamed by the successful issue of the [Revolutionary] war,” he explained, “Were we to live our lives over again and engage in the same benevolent enterprise, our means should not be reasoning but bleeding, purging, low diet, and the tranquilizing chair.” Psychiatry—glorifying the use of coercion as cure—is the shame of  medicine.

In the biblical view, creativity is the prerogative of a single supreme Creator. The Scripture attributes the miracle of life to a specific divine act: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became living soul” (Genesis, 2:7). Hence comes our notion of inspiration as an explanation for great works of art and science. The idea of in-spiration—of breath, soul, or some other mysterious “substance” entering the person from without and enabling him to perform exceptionally good or bad deeds—has never lost its influence on Western thought. It is the source of the notion of possession (by spirits), and its modern successors, “possession” by the creative inspiration of genius and by the destructive irresistible impulse of madness. We replace spirit – god words with body-mind words and exult in our smug conviction that we are explaining exceptionally good and bad behaviors scientifically.

The term “genius” comes from the Latin gignere, meaning to beget. In the Roman world every person was attended by a tutelary deity or spirit, his genius. The Latin inspirare, from in + spirare, to breathe, meant to influence, move, or guide by divine or supernatural inspiration. None of these notions had anything to do with illness or mental illness in the modern sense.

The pseudoscience of psychiatry has, in effect, replaced spirits possessing the person as an explanation for his devilish mind with chemical processes in the brain as an explanation for his diseased mind. The ancients believed in spirits: they were not empiricists and needed no evidence of the material existence of spirits. We moderns are “scientific” and demand empirical “proof ” for medical medical explanations. In the absence of objective evidence for the claim that brain chemicals cause creativity-genius and crime-madness, psychiatrists and science writers use the testimonials of celebrities to support their claim.

Alongside the romantic image of manic-depression as a cause of creativity that does not detract from the subject’s intentionality for his conduct and responsibility for his good deeds stands the bleak image of schizophrenia as a cause of criminality annulling the subject’s intentionality for his conduct and responsibility for his bad deeds. This interpretation, too, lacks objective proof. Instead, its “truth” is enshrined in, and is taught by, the modern clerical and clinical practices of the insanity excuse/defense. Clergymen of all denominations bury all persons who break the religious law against self-killing in consecrated ground, “diagnosing” all suicides automatically non compos mentis at the precise moment of their sinful deed. Similarly, the insanity defense allows lawyers, judges, psychiatrists, and society to incarcerate some persons who break secular laws in prisons called “hospitals,” “diagnosing” all such criminals as having been non compos mentis at the precise moment of their illegal action.

The belief that research in neuroscience and psychiatry will “explain” the alleged connection between genius and madness is a typically modern delusion. Almost a hundred years ago the great German psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer (1888–1964) acknowledged that the notion of “mad genius” is a psychiatric invention: “Since the Italian alienist, [Cesare] Lombroso, first coined that pregnant expression ‘genius and madness’ there has arisen in educated circles a very lively discussion, which, however, has been forced to close with the recognition that modern psychiatry has been responsible for—some might say guilty of—establishing such a connection.”

Genius and madness are vague terms.The only thing clear about them is that, by definition, each term refers to a type of psychological abnormality, a deviation from a behavioral-social norm. Genius and madness are value terms, not medical or scientific terms.

In its contemporary use, then, the term “genius” simply means being very good at something. Being exceptionally virtuous and being exceptionally wicked both count as genius. Stalin and Hitler were geniuses: they excelled in mass-producing corpses, just as Henry Ford excelled in mass-producing cars.

The modern meaning of genius as hereditary excellence was shaped largely by Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), the father of eugenics. Galton was born into a wealthy and distinguished Quaker family. Charles Darwin was his cousin. “Darwin had thought mainly about the evolution of physical features, like wings and eyes,” science writer Jim Holt observes. Applying the same hereditary logic to mental attributes, like talent and virtue, Galton lamented: “If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvements of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!”

How did Galton know that genius is hereditary? The same way that the modern psychiatrist, imitating Galton, knows that manic-depression is hereditary. In his 1869 book Hereditary Genius, Galton assembled long lists of eminent men—judges, poets, scientists, even oarsmen and wrestlers—to show that excellence ran in families.

A cow produces prodigious quantities of milk: she is a bovine genius. A man paints beautiful pictures: he is an artistic genius. Einstein is a scientific genius. Mozart is a musical genius. Are Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed religious geniuses? Are we explaining achievement when we attribute it to the fictitious entity we call “genius,” or are we deceiving ourselves the same way that the scientifically unsophisticated person deceives himself when he declares that hydrogen burns because it is “flammable”? It is true that breeders of animals can produce cows that give lots of milk and horses that win races. The breeder decides; the animal (re)produces. People already do something like this. Men and women choose mates with whom to have children, and bring up children to cultivate the skills (traits) that they, the parents, value. The child can no more choose his parents than the horse can choose its owner-breeder. But the child soon gains power—both physical and legal-political—to cultivate the traits he values, and reject the traits he disvalues. Doing so, he often displeases his breeders, his parents.

A Mad Genius?

What kinds of persons would a breeder of humans want to produce? Obviously, the answer depends on the values and goals of the individual who controls the breeding. Galton wanted to breed a race of persons resembling himself, “creative geniuses.” Ironically, the Galtons had no children. He or his wife was sterile. Galton was said to have suffered two “nervous breakdowns.” Was he a mad genius?

The two great twentieth-century dictators both fancied themselves geneticists. Stalin personally elevated Trofim Lysenko to the status of genius and made him, in 1928, the genetics czar of the Soviet Union. Lysenkoism became a campaign against genetics and geneticists: scientific genetics was stigmatized as a “fascist science,” and the leading geneticists were executed or exiled. The term survives as a metaphor for false beliefs, refuted by empirical evidence but preferred for ideological reasons. Persuaded by the Marxist-Leninist ideology that breeding a “new Socialist man”was a task for politics not biology, Stalin was not interested in using eugenics as a political tool.

Hitler, in contrast, went all the way politicizing Galtonian eugenics. He too sought to improve the “human stock.” The genius he admired was martial and misogynist: men should be warriors; women should be mothers; and all should be members of the “Aryan race.” Accordingly, Hitler sought to breed “healthy” Aryans and eliminate “racial degenerates,” such as Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the mentally ill.

Science explains physical events. Scientism justifies social policies.