A very interesting analysis, though I hope your overstatement is for effect...

It is in fact an overstatement, though the tendencies you describe are surely strong. It is interesting that my field, climatology, is often accused of drumming up an existential threat to preserve our funding, which would be almost as bad of a moral failure as ignoring one. Of course, the situation is somewhat different as physicists advocate bizarre experiments while we are suggesting a bizarre experiment come to an end as soon as possible...