There is a lot of well-deserved blaming going on regarding the activities of various church groups in the last couple of centuries. This has resulted in a serious swing of the us-against-them pendulum towards the idea that religion is evil and science is the cat’s pajama’s.
Not so Fast, Folks
We need to take another look at what science was doing between 1850 and 1900. The popularity of secularism was on the rise, then, and there were those who believed that science was going to be the saving of the human race. Most of us have heard the apocryphal story about the Commissioner of the US Government Patent Office who resigned, recommending that the organization might as well be shut down, because “everything that could be invented has been invented.”
And Then there Was Freud and Co.
This hubris was especially true in the newly invented science of psychology. Practitioners got an exaggerated idea of how their new knowledge could be applied, and the power junkies who used to use religion to control population realized that science might be a better tool.
These people came out with the idea that if you can control what goes into a person, you can predict what will come out.
“Woyzek”
In the 1830s Georg Buchner wrote a play about a doctor with the Prussian Army who was experimenting in this field. He paid a poor soldier to be the subject of a test which involved eating nothing but peas. The result of the study was that Woyzek started having hallucinations and killed his wife because she had been unfaithful to him, then drowned himself. Hardly good publicity for a new science.
Creating Nazis
There is also a theory (for which I have absolutely no scientific evidence) that the Prussian aristocracy applied these brainwashing techniques in the private schools for their children. The input-output control extended to having children lining up to use the toilets and reporting the results of their efforts to a matron as they left.
The connection to the Nazis comes from Freud’s theory that harsh toilet training during the anal stage of psychosexual development produces the anal retentive personality, which corelates closely to Nazi tendencies.
Entertaining Anecdotes Aside…
On a more serious note, there has been an ongoing movement to use scientific principles to control populations, and the church-based education systems of the colonial powers used these scientific theories on Indigenous peoples to great effect.
And it hasn’t stopped. Psychological testing has provided the knowledge to create modern sales techniques, and industries like gambling are using this information to affect the vulnerable in our population.
The Bottom Line
The detrimental effects of religious brainwashing are well known, but we should remember that the atomic bomb is not the only product of modern science which has been released on an unsuspecting and vulnerable public. Hence the fear of GMOs in our food chain and microplastics in every ecological niche on the planet.
The problem with science is that it creates great advances in narrow areas. The new techniques are often applied with great enthusiasm without enough knowledge about their effects on our lives in general.