The Mapmakers Of Society: The Beginnings of a Scientific Dictatorship

The Mapmakers of Society
The Beginnings of a Scientific Dictatorship

Old-Thinker News

By Daniel Taylor

In order to understand our history, the development of our society and political structure, the influence of the large foundations in America is an essential area of research. Their investment into the social sciences and medical establishment shaped their direction for the 20th Century and beyond. Social control and eugenics became a primary directive. These ideas, primarily due to the work of the Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropies, spread throughout the intelligentsia and elite circles throughout the western world.

Dr. Lily E. Kay's 1993 book "The Molecular Vision of Life: Caltech, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rise of the New Biology" documents much of the early history behind the rise of eugenics and life sciences. Kay demonstrates that the drive for social control and eugenics was largely responsible for the emergence and growth of the science of molecular biology. Dr. Kay is a recipient of the Smithsonian Fellowship at the National Museum of American History, and an assistant professor of history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Kay's 2001 obituary from MIT describes her as "...one of the outstanding historians of biology of her generation."

As Dr. Kay documents, large foundations effectively drew the maps for society to follow. The intelligentsia, trained and schooled under the strong influence of the foundations, closely followed the vision of the elite. This vision extended into the realms of education, politics, religion, and the financial world. As Dr. Lily Kay has painstakingly documented, this influential group set out in the United States to engage in a massive research campaign to discover the inner workings of man and in turn to devise methods of social-biological control. The United States, in turn, became the 20th Century progenitor of eugenics.

Dr. Kay paints a clear picture of the massive influence that the wealthy elite in the United States wields, even to the "...development of culture and the production of knowledge in the United States..." Kay writes,

"Thus by the end of the Progressive Era, even before the large-scale commitment to the "advancement of knowledge" spurred by World War I, the human sciences received considerable support from the large foundations. Their numerous projects and the unprecedented scope of their financial and institutional resources shaped the development of culture and the production of knowledge in the United States. Through education, public opinion, stimulation of specific research agenda, and the promotion of selective categories of knowledge and research, the Foundation played a key role in the creation of a hegemonic bloc; the resources and prestige flowing into those fields relevant to problems of social control were instrumental in the formation of consensus between social and political elites, on the one hand, and academic interests on the other."

Large foundations - primarily Rockefeller and Carnegie - were investigated in 1915 by the United States Congress, which reported nearly identical findings to the later 1953 Reece Committee, dedicated to the same cause. The 1915 U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations reported that:

"The domination by the men in whose hands the final control of a large part of American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly extended to control the education and social survival of the nation. This control is being extended largely through the creation of enormous privately managed funds for indefinite purposes, hereafter designated "foundations", by the endowment of colleges and universities, by the creation of funds for the pensioning of teachers, by contributions to private charities, as well as through controlling or influencing the public press...

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