How potent do you think this is in our society? In Social Sciences Sorcery, Stanislav Andreski writes "Even such perely academic theories as the interpretations of human nature have profound practical consequences if diseminated widely enough. If we impress upon people that science has discovered that human beings are motivated only by the desire for material advantage, they will tend to live up to this expectation, and we shall have undermined their readiness to be moved by impersonal ideals. By propagating the opposite view we might succede in producing a large number of idealists, but might also help cynical exploiters to find easy victims. This specific issue, incidentally, is of immense actual importance, because it seems that the moral disorientation and fanatical nihilism which afflicts modern youth has been stimulated by the popular brands of sociology and psychology with their bias for overlooking the more inspiring achievements and focusing on the dismal average or even the subnormal. When, fraudulently basking in the glory of exact sciences, the psychologists refuse to study anything but the most mechanical forms of human behavior--often so mechanical that even rats have no chance to show their higher faculties--and then present their mostly trivial findings as the true picture of the human mind, they prompt people to regard themselves and others as automata, devoid of responsibility or worth, which can hardly remain without effect upon the tenor of social life."
How far are we to be manipulated by some forms of modern science, which suggests that we are only material? Is this no different than prophets of old? Are the majority of people just as duly influenced by what their scientist say as the prophet? Yet at least the prophet was governed by something that appears rational, organized, even if it was only their false projection of God. Instead the scientist is influenced by his or her results, save no other, which are increasingly having a negative effect upon society's values.
