Science & Tech Quote by Francis Parker Yockey

A deliberately acidic definition of progress: not discovery, but rebranding. Yockey loads the sentence with a sneer that’s easy to miss if you read it as a neutral sociology of knowledge. “Profane” is doing the heavy lifting. It doesn’t just mean secular; it implies desecration, a theft of sacred authority, an upstart vernacular trying to sound like revelation. Science, in this frame, isn’t an engine that corrects old errors; it’s a latecomer that inherits religion’s mood, its certainty, its appetite for total explanation, then pretends it arrived ex nihilo.

The trick is the word “restatement.” Restatement suggests translation rather than refutation: dogma doesn’t die, it migrates. That’s the subtextual jab at modernity’s self-mythologizing. Scientific eras congratulate themselves for leaving superstition behind, but Yockey insists they keep the same psychological architecture: priests become experts, liturgy becomes methodology, heresy becomes “unscientific,” salvation becomes “progress.” It’s an argument about authority, not about lab work.

Context matters because Yockey wasn’t a disinterested critic of scientism. As a postwar fascist ideologue and cultural pessimist, he distrusted liberal modernity and its legitimating institutions. This line flatters reactionary impulses: if science is just yesterday’s theology in street clothes, then “enlightenment” is less emancipation than regime change. The intent isn’t to humble science into epistemic modesty; it’s to strip it of moral prestige, making room for older, more hierarchical forms of meaning to retake the throne.