Life & Wisdom Quote by Celia Green

Academic research likes to sell itself as a rugged search for truth. Green punctures that self-myth with a single, coldly bureaucratic word: “requirement.” The problem isn’t that scientists are secretly corrupt; it’s that the system quietly conditions what counts as “good” work long before the data shows up. By framing reinforcement as an institutional necessity rather than a personal failing, she shifts the target from individual bias to the incentives that shape entire fields.

Her phrasing is doing double duty. “Fairly obvious and predictable” is a polite knife. It implies that a lot of published work is not merely wrong, but theatrically unsurprising - research as confirmation-pageant, where the ending is known and the point is to stage it convincingly. Then “approved or fashionable” lands the real critique: intellectual legitimacy is treated like a dress code. “Approved” evokes gatekeepers (funders, journals, tenure committees); “fashionable” evokes trend cycles, where prestige moves faster than understanding.

Green’s context matters. Writing from the mid-to-late 20th-century British intellectual scene - and known for skepticism toward orthodoxies, especially in psychology and consciousness studies - she’s attuned to how dissent gets filtered out without anyone needing to issue explicit bans. The subtext is less “research is fake” than “research is curated.” When careers depend on grants, citation networks, and publishable certainty, curiosity becomes risk management. Novelty survives only when it can be made to look like continuity.