How is it that in an era of supposed triumph of science, an ever-increasing number of people surrender without resistance to the most extreme forms of irrationality and pseudoscience? And how is it possible that the most successful scientific theory of all time ‒ quantum mechanics ‒ is today used as the quintessential tool for manipulating and deceiving hundreds of millions of people around the world, under the "banner" of the infamous New Age and the accompanying Eastern mysticism?

Moreover, how has this "industry" gained the active support of a growing number of university professors in the U.S. and beyond? How did it happen that while the scientific revolution of the 17th century led to the Enlightenment, the abolition of "by divine right" regimes, and ultimately to the establishment of democratic governance, the scientific revolution of the early 20th century now faces an increasing wave of hostility towards the very spirit of science?

A deep-seated hostility of the same nature as that of the Catholic Church towards what Galileo represented? A support for experience and reason as the only valid source of knowledge about the natural world? And is it merely a coincidence that this intellectual hostility towards fundamental science and the Enlightenment, which is currently on the rise in democratic countries ‒ along with the mass appeal of irrationality and pseudoscience ‒ bears striking similarities to corresponding phenomena that dominated interwar Germany?

Ultimately, why did fundamental science thrive ‒ according to the historian of science Thomas Kuhn ‒ "only in cultures derived from ancient Greece"? That is, only in cultures that took on the challenge of democracy and brought it to this point?

And if indeed science and democracy have always gone hand in hand, might the hostility towards science ‒ not the hostility towards its technological applications, but towards the very spirit of science and its radical anti-dogmatism ‒ always have been a bad sign for the future of democracy itself?

This book was written primarily to support the validity of these questions, with the necessary evidence, and merely to hint at possible answers. It is addressed to every concerned citizen of our time.

- The cover design refers to the Vienna Circle ‒ as the pinnacle expression of the spirit of science ‒ and to the Nazi darkness that surrounded it from all sides.