How is it that in an era of supposed triumph of science, an ever-increasing number of people are surrendering without resistance to the most extreme forms of irrationality and pseudoscience? And how is it also that the most successful scientific theory of all time - quantum mechanics - is being used today as the prime tool of manipulation and deception of hundreds of millions of people around the world, under the "flag" of the famous New Age and the Eastern mysticism that accompanies it? And moreover, this "industry" has the active support of a growing number of university professors in the USA and beyond? How did it finally happen that, while the scientific revolution of the 17th century led to the Enlightenment, the abolition of "divine right" regimes, and ultimately the establishment of democratic governments, the scientific revolution of the early 20th century is now facing a growing wave of hostility against the very spirit of science? A deep hostility of the same nature as that of the Catholic Church against everything Galileo represented? The support of experience and reason as the only valid source of knowledge about the natural world? And is it perhaps a coincidence that this intellectual hostility towards fundamental science and the Enlightenment, which is currently on the rise in democratic countries - as well as the mass appeal of irrationality and pseudoscience - has striking similarities with corresponding phenomena that dominated interwar Germany?

Ultimately, why did fundamental science flourish - according to the historian of science Thomas Kuhn - "only in cultures that originated 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 always went together, might the hostility towards science - the hostility not towards its technological applications, but towards the very spirit of science, its radical anti-dogmatism - always have been a bad omen for the future of democracy itself?

This book was written mainly to support the validity of these questions, with the necessary evidence, and simply 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 the Nazi darkness that surrounded it from all sides.