A gross example of the ills of our society lies with its obsession over technology. In thinking about funding in universities and the knowledge mill that universities have become, is it any wonder that sciences have come to rule? I do not mean to imply that the sciences in no way deserve funding, but they do not receive funding because our society values science qua science - knowledge for the sake of pursuing knowledge or of becoming learned. Rather, science is valued, because of its direct influence on material production and our abilities to not only manipulate our material environment, but, as psychology has become the handmaiden of positivist research, to also manipulate our fellow human beings.

It is no surprise that university departments are funded largely by foundations. No different is the case of universities being driven in the direction of market forces, as is the case of medical research funded by a pharmaceutical company perpetually in favor of pharmaceutical research. The fact that the physical and biological sciences receive the most amount of funding in our university system is indicative of our societies bias toward those areas of research, or the value our society places on it. We must, though, be determined to maintain the distinction between scientific research and technological research. Most people care about new gadgets, a new pill to make their ailments disappear, or the ability to explain and thus manipulate their environment. The lack of funding for the social sciences and humanities in our society only demonstrates the poverty in our values. We value pseudo-objectivity of science rather than to the common-sense world of the humanities. We care less about wisdom and more about manipulation. We care less about learning and more about regurgitating, less about the pursuit of truth and more about the construction of it, less about finding the joy in life and more about maximizing pleasure. We clutter our lives with nonsense and gadgetry only to quickly become bored and find something new. This perpetual unease with stability and ourselves forces a longing into us that mandates an ever-flashier world. Instead of looking at what we have and dwelling in the meanings and objects of the day, we actively pursue temporary distractions from our pain and create new objects to obsess over. That obsession soon looses novelty, and we seek something new. This insatiable capricious curiosity demands the manufacture, materially or ideologically, of new distractions. This creates a market demand, or rather the market exploits this need, and produces technology to feed such hunger. This market requires constant knowledge production from scientists, it demands nothing of the meaning-makers and wisdom-seekers of the humanities.

The social sciences really differ little in their cow-towing to the masters of manipulation. Psychology and social theory only recently became "scientized" – a hundred years ago the philosophers were those who studies the psyche as well as society. Now both courses of study have become impoverished and limited to the use of mathematics and statistics under the pretense that these methods are grounded in some sort of permanent Platonic ideal. Math is created, people. Some guy makes up a few axioms and then starts writing theorems. Applying math to society might give us a means of looking at the psyche or society, but we must realize that math arises out of that which it claims to study – namely the psyche, which is formed in part by social bonds. The eyeball cannot see itself perfectly, the razor cannot cut itself, and scientific studies on the human are nothing more than an approximation.

How do we convince humanity that the study of humanity is important? How ironic that humanity is fascinated with the material world only in so far as it satiates their neurosis rather than facinated with study of the neurosis itself? This perhaps was the impetus behind's Plato's ideal of the philosopher kings ruling society – without the value of wisdom, we become thoughtless hedonists. The banality of Modern America is grounded in humanity's obsession with technology.