this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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Wealth inequality is returning to pre-WW1 levels and climate change's effects are becoming visible to the average person, making people desperate for a way out. Education budgets in the US have been steadily slashed, far-right agit-prop by people like Steve Bannon has flooded the internet while the political class that could oppose it are pacified by corporate donors.
No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.
You only have one pair of torn boots, patched shirt and patched trousers, you probably have no underwear too (let alone a few changes of it), have scars all around, only a handful of teeth, much of your hair white, dry skin.
You sleep in some boarding house, or more likely in a hammock at the factory.
You are hungry first half of the day and a bit less hungry and a bit drunk the second half. Oh, I forgot - you likely already have a few such injuries.
You generally don't keep money, it all goes to keep you alive for one more day. Sometimes you don't have work and sleep under some bridge. The border between a worker and a homeless person is fuzzy.
A-and you are not very literate. You get a look of a newspaper or two from time to time.
Most of what you get to read is socialist political agitation, which is kinda fine. But - all that activity doesn't happen at work. You'll lose your bread, that little you get, if you do that. Political assemblies happen at night with torches (hence the traditions of some old parties, not limited to fascist ones).
Oh for fucks sake with the strawman arguments. u/freedom never stated anything indicating support for eugenics. But apart from that you are totally wrong about the social Darwinism, it's just not genetic but Memetic as Richard Dawkins has defined it, bad ideals spreading like disease. As in the idolization of personal freedom and money resulting in idolization of sociopathy as the ultimate expression of individual freedom.
So u/freedom was more right than you, it's just not genetics driving this problem, it's cultural insanity.
What intelligence level on average do you need to be empathetic? Humans are a social creature because being in a community has survival utility. Individually we lose something, but gain in aggregate. Empathy is intelligence. And natural selection and outlining a hypothesis isn’t eugenics. You’ll note that no where in my comment did I advocate for this or even insinuate it.
The connection to eugenics is on you and your thoughts.
Empathy and intelligence are not the same. As evidenced by some highly intelligent people displaying a shocking lack of empathy, and some highly empathetic people not displaying the greatest intelligence.
Personally, I'd rather talk about knowledge and behavior. Intelligence and empathy are hard to quantize.
Leaning into natural selection, proposing we need to let it "run it's course", in a way, to "weed out the weak traits" is eugenics. So is thinking that some traits are "good" and others "bad" without qualifying "for the current social/environmental context". Stupidity might be a good defense against existential depression.
Why do you yourself call the thought "scary" if you don't think it's eugenics? What exactly is scary about letting "weak traits perish" if not that it's inviting a certain form of eugenics to decide who gets to reproduce and/or be born?
You'll note I didn't claim you advocate for it directly, just that your arguments are eugenics-flavored.
Empathy is most definitely a very significant aspect of human intelligence, just because it isn't measured in your standard IQ test doesn't mean it isn't. Scoring high on an IQ test doesn't necessarily mean you are very intelligent, it only means you are good at recognizing the type of patterns used in the test.
No rule applies 100% of the time. Understanding that putting good into the world can improve your environment beyond easily identified individual gains is an intelligent concept likely surfacing from group survival, not individual conscious thought.
Imagine you’re born into a world where 1 out of every 100 people is a socio/psychopath and 10 are (to use your terms) less knowledgeable and prone to manipulation of behavior.
Low socioeconomic status is likely to grow for the subset of 10ths that keeps growing exploited under the less ethical influence of the 1s. Low socioeconomic status is linked to having more offspring, which slowly grows the “10s” to higher and higher relative percentage of the population.
Identifying this mechanism and being concerned for the implications as related to life’s adaptation ability, is certainly controversial, but not eugenics. Eugenics is intentional, this hypothetical just a natural process. The thought of people perishing without recourse is the scary part. I never proposed it needed to run its course “because”, just that it might be too late to stop it now. To be eugenics flavored, I argue intent is necessary. Again, not advocating, just acknowledging it may be unavoidable.