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Your teacher is quite wrong, I believe. "People who do science" don't help you with anything. Maybe one of them sits down and explains things to you, but another is this unfriendly power-hungry sch...
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#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36895 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
Your teacher is quite wrong, I believe. "People who do science" don't help you with anything. Maybe one of them sits down and explains things to you, but another is this unfriendly power-hungry schmuck who abuses students and sticks his name on top of their findings, while yet another falsifies experiment results in order to publish. It is _Science_, as a methodology (the scientific method), as a way of thinking, as a corpus of knowledge, that helps you understand nature. Similarly, not all people in Western culture might pursue worldwide equality, and not all people in a company necessarily seek to promote their product. Those are generalisations, and as such, almost necessarily wrong. It is a concept, a culture, a company, a state that do the things you mention. Companies and states are legal entities, they are thus responsible for their actions. In all cases, and that is, I think, the key to your questions, the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. The unifying concept is bigger than the sum of people united under it, and a particular person might in fact not be a good representative of the unifying concept. In fact, sometimes the concept is an ideal, to which the people can only aspire, and other times each person can only contribute a small part to the whole. (For example, a scientist in all his career might add no more than a small drop of knowledge to the vast ocean of science.)