Potentialities in the Control of Behaviour 
analogous to genes in biological evolution, and Henry A. Murray 
has referred to germinal ideas as idenes. 
The moulding of the newborn human individual into a being 
ready to believe what it is told seems to involve many very 
peculiar processes, which at present may be explained as the 
formation of the superego and the repression of the id, to use 
Freudian terminology. A frequent result of the process seems 
to be that people believe too much and too strongly. The 
process that evolution has provided us with seems often to lead 
to considerable exaggeration of the ability to believe. 
Waddington argues that many of the world’s evils and social 
ills stem from over-activity of the superego, leading to the 
acceptance of socially regressive beliefs with undesirable impact 
upon politics, religion and group identifications. Intense and 
irrational loyalties stemming from early authoritarian accep- 
tance of communication have repeatedly led to fanaticism, 
bigotry and wars. One has but to recall pictures in the Ameri- 
can press of squawking New Orleans women with children in 
their arms hurling imprecations at a white father taking his 
small daughter to a desegregated school, to see pathological 
ethics in action. As Brock Chisholm has pointed out, most of 
the ethical beliefs we hold so strongly are established by acci- 
dents of birth and what we learn, hit or miss, before we are seven 
years old. Emotionally charged prejudices are propagated from 
generation to generation by parental and adult prestige. ‘The 
strongest beliefs may bear little relation to the common good. 
The world has continually been sundered by the hates of rival 
groups and these could, in the nuclear age, soon render man an 
extinct species. 
The rate of increase of scientific information is said now to be 
doubling every ten years, and its technological applications are 
changing society in ways for which there are no precedents. 
The fate of man has become the prize in a gruelling race be- 
tween education and disaster. Traditional methods of education 
and ethical transmission appear to be inadequate, and the 
behavioural sciences so far have not been effective in meeting 
major challenges of the twentieth century. Fear that the 
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