How belief dressed as certainty became the new high-altitude hallucination
On the 8th of May, 1978—an otherwise forgettable Monday in the annals of ordinary human struggle—an Austrian-Italian hybrid named Reinhold Messner and his equally unhinged comrade Peter Habeler carved their names into the thin, murderous air above the world. They reached the summit of Mount Everest without artificial oxygen. No tanks. No masks. No technological umbilicals. Just lungs, willpower, and a willingness to tango with death on the roof of the planet.
This was not a mere mountaineering triumph; this was the high-altitude equivalent of sauntering onto the moon without a spacesuit and then sending back a postcard that read, “Wish you were here.” Every medic worth his stethoscope insisted the human body simply could not operate at that altitude unassisted. Too little oxygen, too much exhaustion, too much everything that kills you and too little of everything that keeps you alive. Experts declared it impossible in the self-assured way experts do—firmly, confidently, and with the total absence of humility that tends to characterize people who have never risked their existence on a windswept ridge of ice and rock.
And yet Messner and Habeler did it.
This post first appeared in 2020, back when I still entertained hope that rational arguments might sway public sentiment. I’ve since remastered it—sharpened the edges, clarified the threat, and realigned it with the Grimwright ethos: use what works, discard the rest, and always—always—question the narrative. The date remains unchanged as a historical marker. The content does not.
It is not surprising that Messner shot into global renown like a meteor punched out of Olympus. Suddenly he wasn’t merely a seasoned alpinist; he was the alpinist. The oracle of heights, the sherpa of human potential, the man who defied biology and lived to give interviews about it. His name became shorthand for “superhuman.” If he said a mountain could kill you, you believed him. If he said a cloud looked ominous, you packed your tent. If he said the Himalayan gods whispered to him, you checked your translator for compatibility issues.
And he didn’t stop there. Consuming Everest without oxygen was apparently too modest for the man. He went on to scale every 8,000-meter peak on Earth—again without the artificial life support that most climbers consider basic survival gear. To this day, so few people have repeated this feat without oxygen that you could almost count them with your boots on. Seventeen, last anyone bothered tallying. Barely enough to form a volleyball team.
Messner became the living archetype of the mountain hero: unbending, monomaniacal, stubborn as glacier ice, and propelled by a form of obsession that in any other profession would earn you psychiatric supervision. He does not give up. He does not compromise. He does not go around an obstacle—he climbs it. He is, in short, one of the few remaining humans who live according to the old heroic script rather than the new therapeutic one.
And it is exactly this near-mythical credibility that made what happened next so catastrophic.
Because in 1986, one of Austria’s most celebrated and scientifically honored men declared that he had seen the Yeti.
Not “maybe.” Not “something weird.” No. The Yeti. The Himalayan snowman. Myth in the fur. Cryptozoology’s prom king.
Ask an Austrian today what they remember about Messner, and many won’t tell you about the death-defying ascents, the triumph of biology over physics, or the record-shattering endurance. No, they’ll chuckle and recount that story. The Yeti. The moment the hero stepped off Olympus and face-planted into folklore.
The Day the God of the mountains saw the beast
The year was 1986. Messner was alone in a stretch of Tibetan wilderness you can only reach if you have either a helicopter or the stamina of a borderline lunatic. Dusk was falling, the trees thickened, and the path vanished into the kind of gloom that devours orientation. That is when it happened.
He saw a creature—what locals called a Chemo—tall, shaggy, smelly enough to gag a yak, and very much alive. Not a bear. Not a hallucination. Something else. Messner froze, panic surged, and the man who defied Everest suddenly sprinted through darkness, stumbling toward the dim hope of shelter. He reached a village, was attacked by guard dogs, shook them off, and finally collapsed among humans who didn’t reek like wet carpets.
It was a great tale. A magnificent tale. The kind of tale that could anchor a lifetime of campfire retellings.
But it had one fatal flaw.
There was no evidence. Not a hair, not a footprint, not a photograph. Nothing but Messner’s towering credibility.
And for the first time in his life, credibility wasn’t enough.
Austria laughed. Hard. Mercilessly. Newspapers mocked him with sketches of an empty animal cage labeled, “Yeti—visible only to Reinhold Messner.” A god had tripped, and the public—ever eager for schadenfreude—pounced with the glee of peasants watching a nobleman fall off a horse.
Messner’s legacy survived, but not unscathed. The Yeti clung to him like a burr—harmless, ridiculous, but forever attached.
Why? Because in the end, Messner failed to deliver the one thing modern civilization hinges on: proof.
The old Rule: show your Work or shut up
There was a time—not so long ago—that rational societies insisted on evidence. If you claimed you had invented something, you didn’t get to stroll into a patent office, wave your hands theatrically, and announce, “Trust me.” No, you were expected to produce a working specimen. A living, breathing, functional demonstration.
A sketch? Cute. A theory? Inspirational. A model? Interesting.
But unless it worked, nobody cared.
And rightly so.
Because without evidence, you weren’t dealing with science or reason or even speculation. You were dealing with belief. And belief—without evidence—is nothing more than hope wearing a fake beard and sunglasses.
When I grew up, science still respected this difference. Facts were facts, theories were theories, and speculative musings were politely cordoned off into their own corner, like eccentric uncles at family gatherings. None of them were banned. They were simply labeled.
Today?
Everything is belief. Opinion. Narrative. If enough people with prestige declare something to be true, the rest of civilization nods along like trained seals waiting for a sardine.
When Belief enters the Olympics of Fact
Take the unicorn.
No, not the startup variety. The actual, horn-on-the-forehead horse variety.
Ancient seals in the Indus Valley depicted them. Greek writers took those images at face value. Ctesias, Strabo, Pliny the Younger—intelligent men, all—carefully cataloged unicorns in natural history treatises. And so unicorns lived happily in the scientific imagination until the late 19th century, when someone finally bothered to show that these creatures did not, in fact, parade across Asia in shimmering herds.
Once a belief becomes “established knowledge,” dislodging it becomes harder than removing a tick from a politician’s career. Try disproving God, for instance. How? By measuring the silence?
Belief survives precisely because it is unfalsifiable.
The modern priesthood of climate alarmism has perfected this art. For more than thirty years, they have predicted doom with the confidence of end-times prophets and the accuracy of broken clocks.
In 1988, James Hansen predicted the West Side Highway in Manhattan would be underwater within twenty years. Last I checked, taxis are still driving on it rather than swimming across.
In 2007, Al Gore—collecting his Nobel Peace Prize like a sanctified oracle—claimed studies suggested the Arctic might be ice-free in seven years. We are now over a decade past that prophecy, and the Arctic ice is more stubborn than a Viennese civil servant at 3 p.m.
When a prediction fails, a new one is conjured, conveniently far enough in the future that the predictor can retire before the reckoning. A flexible apocalypse with a rolling schedule.
Nobody asks them to show their game. Nobody demands their models. Nobody checks their assumptions. Michael Mann preferred losing a lawsuit to revealing the inner workings of his climate model—an omission so damning it hardly requires commentary.
Where evidence is demanded, belief collapses. So belief’s salesmen avoid evidence the way vampires avoid sunlight.
The Behavioral Pattern of the Professional Believer
The merchants of belief—the modern oracles, doom-mongers, and climate conquistadors—share a familiar playbook:
They hide their data.
Because sunlight disinfects nonsense.
They reject progress.
Truth is static for them. Debate is treason.
They treat criticism as persecution.
Because their arguments cannot survive cross-examination.
They speak in vague prophecies.
Could, might, possibly, likely—hedging disguised as insight.
Traditional science works the opposite way: it tries to break its own ideas. If reality refuses to cooperate, the theory dies. This is healthy. This is normal. This is how we climbed out of caves.
Para-science—the term long predating our current hysteria—operates by the reverse logic: if the theory is beautiful enough or politically profitable enough, reality must bend.
And bend it does, especially when careers, prestige, and government grants depend on it.
The Cash Circus of the Green Priesthood
Science is no longer the monastery of truth-seekers; it has devolved into a tribal bazaar of status-hungry hustlers. Speak the orthodoxy, and you’re showered with grants, attention, conference invitations, media exposure, and maybe even a cameo on a royal family’s “saving the planet” documentary.
Dare to question the liturgy, and you’re cast out as a heretic.
Peer review has become a guild system designed to keep dissenters out and ensure loyalty to the prevailing creed. Journals march in lockstep, academia nods dutifully, and politicians—ever allergic to thinking—follow whichever prophets promise them moral absolution and votes.
The green industrial complex feeds on this. Fear is profitable. Fear sells. Fear mobilizes. Just ask Ponzi, who—in a detail almost too symbolic—managed to raise more than half his lifetime haul after he was exposed as a fraud.
Humans love belief. They crave belief. They will bankrupt themselves for belief.
The Monkeys, the Ladder, and the Bananas
There is a famous experiment—likely apocryphal, but true in spirit—involving five monkeys, a ladder, and a cluster of bananas.
Whenever one monkey climbed the ladder, all the others were blasted with ice-cold water. Eventually, they beat any monkey who dared try. Then one monkey was swapped out. The new monkey tried the ladder. The others beat him—even though the cold water no longer came.
One by one, every monkey was replaced. Eventually, none of them had ever experienced the cold shower. None of them knew why they were enforcing the rule.
But they continued beating any monkey who tried climbing the ladder.
Ask them why—if they could talk—and they would likely shrug and say, “That’s just how things are done.”
Humanity has become that cage.
Belief enforced by ritual. Orthodoxy maintained by inertia. No evidence required. No questioning tolerated.
The Modern Yeti
Which brings us back to Messner.
His Yeti harmed no one but himself. He paid the price in public ridicule. That’s how it should be: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence—or at least some evidence.
But today’s prophets of parascience demand you reorganize the economy, restructure society, sacrifice prosperity, surrender autonomy, and dismantle the infrastructure that sustains your life—all because their models say the sky might fall.
They offer no working specimen, no demonstrated mechanism, no transparency. Just fear, forecasts, and fury at anyone who demands receipts.
Belief replaces evidence. Consensus replaces truth. Narrative replaces demonstration.
And the cost is not a bruised ego—it is civilization itself.
We are dismantling our foundations because a new priesthood has declared the end is nigh, waving broken models like medieval relics and demanding tribute in the form of public obedience and economic collapse.
Enough.
Time to Force the Walk of Shame
If someone insists on running the world based on their model, they must show the model. Every assumption. Every dataset. Every correction. Every step.
If they refuse?
Then they belong with the palm readers, the astrologers, the psychics, and the Yetis wandering through the dark forests of unproofed imagination.
Belief without evidence is the modern Yeti: entertaining, occasionally thrilling, but ultimately a shapeless shadow projected by ambition and fear.
Reinhold Messner saw a creature once and told the world. The world laughed, and life carried on.
But today’s professional fear-mongers?
They demand laws, budgets, and obedience on the basis of something they refuse to reveal.
They are not harmless.
They are not eccentric.
They are not misguided.
They are dangerous.
Time to smoke them out. Drag their claims into daylight. Demand their evidence. And if they can’t produce it?
Then send them down the same trail Messner took—straight into the long, cold night of deserved ridicule.
Because belief without proof has no more place in public policy than a Yeti has in a zoo.
Not even one only Reinhold Messner can see.
