Not wild at all, look at his other stuff, and then back at Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park is only incidentally about the evils of capitalism, because Crichton blames the mechanics of capitalism on scientists.
His moral mouthpiece character says this :
I'll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists. Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature. Which is true, but that's not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.'
Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don't do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first.
That's the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward.
Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts.
Astronauts leave trash on the moon.
There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.
Michael Crichton considers science and innovation the same things. He doesn't seem to be aware that archeology, biology and medicine are also all sciences.
Of course he thinks climate change is a hoax. To him that's the rapists making up excuses like how she asked for it.
The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can't just watch. They can't just appreciate. They can't just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist's job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific."
No, we have whole capitalist societies, and they like to edge into fascism, and neither of those value science very much.
βBut scientific power is like inherited wealth: attained without discipline. You read what others have done, and you take the next step. You can do it very young. You can make progress very fast. There is no discipline lasting many decades. There is no mastery: old scientists are ignored. There is no humility before nature.
There is only a get-rich-quick, make-a-name-for-yourself-fast philosophy. Cheat, lie, falsifyβit doesnβt matter. Not to you, or to your colleagues. No one will criticize you. No one has any standards. They are all trying to do the same thing: to do something big, and do it fast.
βAnd because you can stand on the shoulders of giants, you can accomplish something quickly. You donβt even know exactly what you have done, but already you have reported it, patented it, and sold it. And the buyer will have even less discipline than you. The buyer simply purchases the power, like any commodity. The buyer doesnβt even conceive that any discipline might be necessary.β
βIβll make it simple,β Malcolm said. βA karate master does not kill people with his bare hands. He does not lose his temper and kill his wife. The person who kills is the person who has no discipline, no restraint, and who has purchased his power in the form of a Saturday night special. And that is the kind of power that science fosters, and permits.
Note how he skips over the role of propaganda entirely.
Yeah sure this guy dislikes theme parks, and that maybe even be tied to his height on a subconscious level, but let's not ignore the more likely reasons : he dislikes environmental science specifically.
Jurassic Park is a big sermon against a bunch of sciences that are currently working on preventing further environmental damage, like gene reconstruction and environmental management.
One of his last novels is straight up about evil environmental activists murdering people as a method to advertise their (what Crichton sees as) climate change conspiracy. By causing natural disasters because they can control the weather, so they are faking the damage of global warning to warn people of it.
Crichton believes environmentalism is a religion, because apparently he has interacted exclusively with Christian commercial environmentalism and then called it a day. Couldn't imagine there's any human variation or anything.
"There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all.
We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
. . . Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed.
Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge.
Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover.
We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things."
Don't you just love it when high horse artists use "religion" when they mean that insulated groups of any kind are at risk of forming rigid beliefs.
Or when they act as if Christianity and religion are synonymous.
Environmental care predates Christianity.
The firsts scientists were indigenous people, and plenty of them nowadays carry on this science, and have thousands of years of effect to back it up. Those bad fire management problems for example, there were people around who knew the solution, just the park managers weren't listening because racism, not because of religion.
A lot of their well tested science was interwoven with spirituality, which didn't make their land management less effective.
Crichton knows very well that indigenous people exist, he just thinks their environmental science doesn't count, so he decided that the best and only way to represent them in State of Fear was as cannibals who end up eating the environmentalist who infiltrator to the heroic team.
Here's a recent article on the harm his State of Fear novel has done to understanding of climate change.
One time Crichton acknowledges that indigenous people have any nature science was in his novel Congo, where a team of heroic miners looking to plunder diamonds in Africa come across an an ancient indigenous city, still guarded by specially bred super aggressive gorillas that the indigenous scientists left behind. It is suggested they bred themselves with the gorillas, which worked somehow, because the gorillas are intelligent enough to have language and tool use.
In other words, the indigenous people scienced themselves into always chaotic evil monsters.
The heroic invaders trigger a volcanic eruption while heroically plundering the mine, which conveniently wipes out the evil hybrids.
There's some regular indigenous humans showing up at the end, who are again cannibals, to provide an additional escape scene.
I cannot emphasize enough how incredibly bad Michael Crichton was at listening to anyone whose existence contradicts his view of the evils of environmental science.
Parts of Jurassic Park may feel like they criticize the impact of capitalism and bigotry, but he wants people to hate scientists for those problems, not capitalists or colonizers.
He does not deserve the reputation as a science book guy.
