Eugenics as an ideology
Legal and political agendas have motivations to make semantic arguments that obscure eugenics and maybe that’s why we don’t have a separate word for eugenics as an ideological belief.
I reject the premise that we must confine the term “eugenics” to very specific, and by only specific legal definitions, which often change depending on who’s doing the defining. I think this shuts down discussion on the ideologies behind these practices, and thereby threatens potential victims who are unaware of the agenda. There are eugenics ideologies that lead to eugenics practices and we can only guard against them by recognizing the plans before the horrible conclusions.
Eugenics is not just a practice but also an ideology based in pseudoscience. The belief in eugenics is founded upon unscientific fantasies about evolution, lineage, or erroneous ideas about cause and effect. It’s not just that it’s morally abhorrent in whatever practice, it’s also just flat out wrong and doesn’t even work as advertised because it’s junk science based in a quasi-religious framework. Most people find eugenics abhorrent when examined for the cruel details, but yet it seems to have a way of sneaking into surprising spaces with alluring hooks that play on cognitive biases.1
Some of the denial surrounding the eugenics-like decisions in the pandemic has relied upon a narrow unipolar understanding of eugenics. The historically most recognizable concept of eugenics is where active intervention is done to choose the winners and losers, such as forced breeding, sterilization, deprivation, and murderous executions, by the active will and openly admitted choices of the people in power over the scheme, asserting their authority to do so. Overt violence and horrendous mayhem is easier to spot, though sadly actual ignorance has played a factor in clear cut genocide as well.2 Holocaust denial is a form of anti-semitism.3 But denial in the form of a delayed acknowledgement or action has been at times politically incentivized.4 Nevertheless deliberate killings are deliberate killings.
The possibly more prevalent, and somewhat more insidious version of eugenics ideology, that has flown under the radar in our modern world, is the variety that spawned grotesque and wholly unscientific ideas like “natural herd immunity” in the pandemic, as pushed by Scott Atlas5 and The Great Barrington Declaration adherents.6 To withhold prevention of suffering from those vulnerable.The proponents of this type of eugenics claim that they are leaving it up to “nature” or, alternately, specifically a divine power, depending on their religious or secular orientation. The point is to stop any intervention that would save people they think are “weak” or “undeserving” in some way as inappropriately countering the superior “nature” to do its thing. This includes resistance to all public health measures like masks, vaccines, food assistance, healthcare equity, or even disaster relief and universal education in public schools. Never mind that interventions are natural too, because humans do them, the same way birds build nests, but clearly people draw the line on “natural” wherever it’s convenient to their purpose.
Adherents of this eugenics model are willing to risk themselves in the process, which confuses onlookers to think they must simply be mistaken or misled. But the reason they risk themselves, to the vagaries of pandemics, climate change, or any number of calamities that happen in a world where they too must live, is partly that a eugenics belief often incorporates the fantasy that one’s own self - or “their people” - will be the preferred deserving superior who will of course survive and benefit in this scheme by whatever reason be it the idea of a deserving lineage or some “awakening” or intellect. Another reason people buy into risk is because of “the Outrage Factor”7 - the tendency where people are accepting of risk if they feel they’re volunteering for it, and only object to risk if they feel it’s an unfair imposition.
Though Peter Greene didn’t mention the word in a republished blog post about school privatization, he explains this concept of eugenics perfectly in describing adherents that “believe the marketplace is God's own way of sorting out the deserving from the undeserving. Their own wealth and success are a result of their superior awesomeness, not the luck of timing and circumstance. And if you are poor, that is a reflection of your unworthiness, your moral failings, your character flaws, and trying to boost you out of that is to go against the laws of nature. The implication underlying all this? Not everyone can succeed, and not everyone should.”8
But these beliefs do not require adherence to any major religion. The TESCREAL ideologies as described by Émile P. Torres, are fellow travelers in parallel, where the adherents believe a utopian future “will require a lot of really “smart” people doing really “smart” things, we must optimize our “smartness.”9 Many of these people would claim no theist faith, nevertheless buy into a secular pseudoscience based ideology, often that so eerily resemble Rapture beliefs that they are sometimes referred to as techno-rapture beliefs.10
Sometimes it can be hard to spot this type of eugenics because people expect eugenicists to be simply ruthless or outwardly sinister - yet they can be seen helping their children and friends with handouts often enough, or even other people’s children, and extending their benevolence to people they bring into their fold. They take care of their own. Even those embracing the idea of rugged individualism, competition to the death wish-casting, and a punitive fantasyland perspective of the world, still know they need social structures because they know human survival is based on a collective. The point is that they are only communal or caring to their in-group, whatever the identity, lineage, or membership requirements.11 Any moves for the larger collective, the public at large, or people they consider “other” or inferior in some way, is not desired under this eugenics ideology.12 The desire is for a commune over community, which is not conducive to democracy.13
Of course none of this eugenics reasoning makes sense but there are people who, often out of motivated reasoning,14 push this apocalyptic hopium. Not doing anything to stop pandemic disease, climate change, or other corporate caused harms, benefits certain parties and their bottom lines, so this ideology is potentially tantalizing beyond the true believers.
References:
PBS Hacking Your Mind - Living on Autopilot - Episode 101 Aired: 09/09/20 According to Kahneman, when our slow-thinking system doesn't have enough information to answer a question involving numbers, we simply stay on autopilot. And our autopilot system takes what might be called a shortcut and anchors its answer to the last number that crossed its radar, even when that number is completely irrelevant to the question at hand. -And that leads us to reach an absurd conclusion. I know it seems bizarre that anyone would do that, and surely you and I, reasonable people, would never do that in our real lives. Well, you do it all the time.
“Leave None to Tell the Story” Genocide in Rwanda written by Alison Des Forges based on research by Alison Des Forges Timothy Longman Michele Wagner Kirsti Lattu Eric Gillet Catherine Choquet Trish Huddleston Jemera Rone March 1999 by Human Rights Watch In May 1994, U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali admitted that the international community had failed the people of Rwanda in not halting the genocide. From that time through 1998, when U.S. President Bill Clinton apologized for not having responded to Rwandan cries for help and Secretary- General Kofi Annan expressed regret in vaguer terms, various world leaders have acknowledged responsibility for their failure to intervene in the slaughter.
US Dept of State - Defining Holocaust Distortion and Denial - Office of the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues The goals of Holocaust denial often are the rehabilitation of an explicit antisemitism and the promotion of political ideologies and conditions suitable for the advent of the very type of event it denies.
Samantha Power A Problem from Hell 2003 As was true with previous genocides these US officials were making potent political calculations about what the US public would abide. Officials simultaneously believed the American people would oppose US military intervention in central Africa and feared that the public might support intervention if they realized a genocide was underway. As always they looked to op-ed pages of elite journals, popular protest, and congressional noise to gauge public interest. No group or groups in the United States made Clinton administration decision makers feel or fear that they would pay a political price for doing nothing to save Rwandans. Indeed all the signals told them to steer clear. Only after the genocide would it become possible to identify an American constituency for action. At the height of the war in Bosnia the op-ed pages of America’s newspapers had roared with indignation. During the 3 month genocide in Rwanda they were silent, ignorant, and prone fatalistically to accept the futility of outside intervention.
Medpage Today: Report Shows Trump Administration Embraced Herd Immunity via Mass Infection — The strategy likely contributed to many preventable deaths, report notes - by Jennifer Henderson, June 22, 2022 "Dr. Atlas's stated reasoning for his dismissal of masks -- that they were purportedly ineffective at mitigating transmission of the coronavirus -- appears inconsistent with his pandemic strategy, which was premised on allowing the virus to spread rapidly among lower-risk individuals to facilitate disease-acquired herd immunity," the subcommittee wrote. "Whatever his rationale, the anti-mask policy advocated by Dr. Atlas would have had -- and did have -- the same effect as the policies he advocated in connection with his open pursuit of a herd immunity strategy: enabling the virus to infect and kill many more Americans.
Important Context: New Scientist Group Calling For Pandemic Answers Has Ties to Right-Wing Dark Money. The Norfolk Group purports to be a group of independent experts, but familiar faces suggest a broader agenda. By Walker Bragman, Feb 16 2023 The 80-page Norfolk Group paper actually reads a bit like score-settling for the scientists involved. It takes particular aim at perceived enemies of the Great Barrington Decalration like Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator. Birx notably refused to participate in a roundtable discussion with Bhattacharya and Kulldorff back in the summer of 2020, calling them “a fringe group without grounding in epidemics, public health or on the ground common sense experience.” “Did policy experts know about pre and early pandemic statements in which experts cast doubt on the ability of quarantine and lockdown measures to stop community spread without excessive collateral damage?” the document asks. “Why did Dr. Birx purposely avoid meeting with public health experts who had specifically proposed such measures?” Other targets include Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, respectively the former directors of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the NIH. Both had been dissenting voices in the Trump White House as the administration embraced the Great Barrington Declaration.
Outrage factor From Wikipedia "Outrage factors" are the emotional factors that influence perception of risk. The risks that are considered involuntary, industrial and unfair are often given more weight than factors that are thought of as voluntary, natural and fair. Sandman gives the formula: Risk = Hazard + Outrage
Curmudgucation - School Choice Isn't Uber. It's LulaRoe. From September 2021 - PETER GREENE SEP 14, 2023 They believe the marketplace is God's own way of sorting out the deserving from the undeserving. Their own wealth and success are a result of their superior awesomeness, not the luck of timing and circumstance. And if you are poor, that is a reflection of your unworthiness, your moral failings, your character flaws, and trying to boost you out of that is to go against the laws of nature. The implication underlying all this? Not everyone can succeed, and not everyone should. This is not an idea that translates well to public education, but it is a foundational belief about how the world works, and their ideas about the freedom to rise or fall on your merits echo those of fellow multi-level millionaires, Dick and Betsy DeVos (in fairness, Betsy's money also comes from the manufacture of auto parts).
The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares. To understand the deepening divide between AI boosters and doomers, it’s necessary to unpack their common origins in a bundle of ideologies known as TESCREAL. Émile P. Torres Truthdig - Jun 15, 2023 If transhumanism is eugenics on steroids, cosmism is transhumanism on steroids. In his “The Cosmist Manifesto,” the former Extropian who christened the now-common term “artificial general intelligence,” Ben Goertzel, writes that “humans will merge with technology,” resulting in “a new phase of the evolution of our species.” Eventually, “we will develop sentient AI and mind uploading technology” that “will permit an indefinite lifespan to those who choose to leave biology behind.” Many of these “uploaded minds” will “choose to live in virtual worlds.” The ultimate aim is to “develop spacetime engineering and scientific ‘future magic’ much beyond our current understanding and imagination,” where such things “will permit achieving, by scientific means, most of the promises of religions — and many amazing things that no human religion ever dreamed.” This brings us to Rationalism and Effective Altruism. The first grew out of a website called LessWrong, which was founded in 2009 by Yudkowsky, Bostrom’s colleague in the early Extropian movement. Because realizing the utopian visions above will require a lot of really “smart” people doing really “smart” things, we must optimize our “smartness.”
Current Affairs - The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” by Émile P. Torres filed 28 July 2021 Not only do many longtermists believe that superintelligent machines pose the greatest single hazard to human survival, but they seem convinced that if humanity were to create a “friendly” superintelligence whose goals are properly “aligned” with our “human goals,” then a new Utopian age of unprecedented security and flourishing would suddenly commence. This eschatological vision is sometimes associated with the “Singularity,” made famous by futurists like Ray Kurzweil, which critics have facetiously dubbed the “techno-rapture” or “rapture of the nerds” because of its obvious similarities to the Christian dispensationalist notion of the Rapture, when Jesus will swoop down to gather every believer on Earth and carry them back to heaven. As Bostrom writes in his Musk-endorsed book Superintelligence, not only would the various existential risks posed by nature, such as asteroid impacts and supervolcanic eruptions, “be virtually eliminated,” but a friendly superintelligence “would also eliminate or reduce many anthropogenic risks” like climate change.
Why Do People Deny Genocide? - NowThis Originals - Jun 21, 2016 The United Nations adopted the Convention in 1948, following the Armenian Genocide during World War One and the Holocaust during World War Two. The Convention originally also planned to include political groups, but at the time, the Soviet Union refused to acknowledge the addition, and it was removed. Despite a relatively clear definition, accusations of genocide are almost always denied. Many make a distinction between genocide, and crimes against humanity. For example, in the Congo, one Rwandan Tutsi leader was nicknamed the Terminator for his mass killings of civilians and the recruitment of child soldiers. And yet, in the International Criminal Court, he was charged with Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes, but not genocide.
Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson - Reacting to the worst select subcommittee ever (w/ Walker Bragman) Mar 14, 2023 Dr. Wilson: "Washing your hands is good. Like Jesus man, how are you a surgeon, and you're advocating against washing hands? And it's funny because Kulldorff just said we shouldn't focus on one disease, we should focus on all diseases. Well washing hands is just generally good for infectious diseases, it just generally helps prevent it." Walker Bragman: "Any amount of sacrifice by the individual for the collective is vilified."
David Troy: Disinformation and its effects on social capital networks, 2023 7. Relationships determine public health outcomes. Most of the information about a society is found in relationships. Speaking mathematically, a graph depicting a meshed network of 50 people will contain 1,225 relationships. When people talk about “individual” rights, they are willfully discounting the many relationships that may be affected by the behavior of individuals. This should serve as a reminder that any effort to promote specific human behaviors must be evaluated through the possible effects on human relationship networks, and whether those changes are positive or negative. 8. Only certain network configurations can support democracy. If it is possible to render democracy impossible through manipulation of social capital, then it follows that there is also a range of “healthy” network configurations that can support democracy, and that those, too, can be sought through engineering of social capital. Deciding who has the moral authority to assume that role carries major ethical quandaries, however failure to engage will cede the question to actors like Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Charlie Kirk, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin, et al. 9. A network of disconnected cults cannot support a functional democracy. Some minimal level of cross-cutting social connections between networks of interest must be maintained in order to support a functional pluralistic democracy. Too many cultish groups, each unwilling to compromise, produces the kind of “bundled aggrieved factions” that are useful to populist fascist leadership. It is therefore in the interest of populist fascists to promote social atomization and to destroy cross-cutting social ties.
Jared Yates Sexton @JYSexton 11:01 AM · Nov 28, 2023 Let’s say one of the richest men on the planet goes through a very public radicalization. It’s not because he listened to the wrong thing. It’s because his wealth makes democracy a natural enemy and these conspiracy theories legitimize his prejudices and cruel hierarchical ideas