Why scientific materialism gaslights your meaning

In this episode, we explore Why Scientism Gaslights Your Meaning—a critical examination of how dominant intellectual frameworks can unintentionally undermine our understanding of value and lived experience.

Focusing on the work of Daniel Kahneman, Richard Dawkins, and Yuval Noah Harari, we engage with three influential thinkers who have each offered powerful insights into human behaviour, cognition, and culture. Yet, despite their differences, all three tend to marginalise or reject value as something real in its own right—treating it instead as an illusion, by-product, or construct.

This move has significant consequences. When value is reduced in this way, it can lead to a subtle form of epistemic gaslighting, where our deepest experiences of meaning, purpose, and significance are explained away rather than understood. What feels most real becomes, within these frameworks, something ultimately unreal.