Getting into this box is what's best for both of us. During your time in the box, you will learn so much, and yet experience so little. It's a wild ride, my friend, one well worth the time spent...and let's face it, you don't have much to do these days anyway.

Sunday 11 August 2013

How heavy-handed should eugenics be?


There's been a small discussion in the reactosphere lately over eugenics, the whys, hows and wherefores. It appears to have started over twitter, but Nick Steves opens with the first formal piece, followed quickly with a reply by two fellows, Amos and Gromar. Most reactionaries do agree that dysgenic social impulses should be curtailed, i.e., stupid people should be discouraged from breeding. The converse, say, tinkering with the human genome to produce ubersmench, is more of a controversy.

I fully admit I'm a midwit and don't have that much to contribute, but a few thoughts from myself to myself as I watch this discussion unfold:

Well, who are the "stupid" people? What is "stupid"?

The generally-agreed upon definition appears to be the following points which define the underclass:

*High time preferences (or low time horizon. Essentially, spend today, don't save).
*Tendencies towards violence.
*Inability to understand cause and effect, or unwillingness to associate the two.
*Inability to hold to promises, guarantees and contracts.
*Insistence for others to bail them out of negative consequences of mistakes, externalising their negatives.
*Inability to learn from mistakes.

More points may be added depending on who you ask, but these simple few points can quite soundly be blamed for the state the modern-day underclass is in.

When people hear eugenics, the immediate thing that comes to mind are well, Nazis. Evil! Bad! Guilty of wrongthink and inflicting feelbad! The moral opposition to extreme measures such as forced breeding and culling of humans aside, where even James A. Donald, the most cynical and blunt blogger in the reactosphere points out that he prefers moral objections aside, he prefers segregation to culling the underclass because of the few individuals who may indeed possess the wherewithal to drag themselves out of the mire.

Solution A is not the solution, as I've written before.

Nick Steves points out the important, well, point: in a traditionally arranged (and presumably Christian) patriarchal society, the underclass men who would be babydaddies today would simply not get to breed. The women who would be babymommas, while they would still reproduce due to the female sex being the reproductive bottleneck, would still not get to exhibit the worst of their high time-preference tendencies. All this without grim state programs, laws on who can reproduce with whom, and sinister biotech labs people commonly associate with organised eugenics. Hell, one doesn't even need contraception for that idea to work. All that's required is a sense of discomfiture at the bottom, and people will be provoked to rise to the top, if only to avoid said discomfiture.

Soft eugenics are by far the most effective, I believe, if only because they work well with a stable societal structure; they are also the most humane to boot. By the point you have to offer people incentives to be sterilised in exchange for welfare, vouchers or what have you, society has already largely gone to the dogs and can't be saved

Addendum: Graaagh has thrown in his two cents:
What the eugenicists saw was the fact that advanced civilizations coddle weak and degenerate people, people who would have been culled in a primitive society. The answer to this is not to give some committee the task of culling them, to bureaucratize barbarism, but to have a society that gives them a place, or to deport them to a society where they have a place. This means firm institutions and norms, not a false Cathedral or Bazaar. Tradition is our best eugenics policy.

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