“Progressive” types just love eugenics when it suits them. In the 1920s and early ’30s, eugenics was all the rage in progressive circles. Margaret Sanger and H G Wells, for instance, were very big on “weeding out the unfit”. Champagne socialist and miserable old bat Virginia Woolf huffed that defective idiots and imbeciles “should certainly be killed”.
George Bernard Shaw outlined their goals explicitly: “I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will instantly and painlessly …” Those who couldn’t justify their existence – the infirm, the habitually unemployed, criminals and other burdens on society – would be escorted into the gas chamber and done away with.
Then the Nazis took him up on it – and progressives dropped eugenics like a hot can of Zyklon B.
For a while, anyway.
More recently, progressives have rediscovered eugenics – where it suits them. A justification for abortion was put forward by the authors of Freakonomics: abortion stops crime!
Were the progressives actually onto something?
Anthropologist Peter Frost and population geneticist Henry Harpending authored a paper in 2015 arguing that the promiscuous use of the death penalty had a eugenic effect on the English population. Specifically, by removing at least two per cent of the population each year, those prone to violence, the overall population became dramatically less violent over time.
The progressives aren’t exactly embracing the argument, though. Not least because it directly undermines a key ideological pillar of leftist thought: that humans are “amorphous blobs that can be shaped into anything”. Instead, biology really does matter. “Trans-women” really aren’t women.
It has also been argued that the Black Death delivered a fillip to European society by weeding out the gene pool.
There is a correlation between IQ and health, so it stands to reason that plagues will hit the stupid harder than the smart. Remove enough stupid people from the population and the average IQ rises […]
Of course, the same argument could be made on behalf of the death penalty. Generally, criminals are of below-average intelligence. If your policy is to remove criminals from the breeding stock via the hangman, you will inevitably be removing far more stupid criminals than smart ones. In other words, the death penalty probably helped raise the overall IQ of the population.
A population that is smart and peaceful will be more successful than a population that is stupid and violent. We only have to compare Finland with Somalia to see how this works in our own age. Somalia has an estimated average IQ of 67, while Finland comes in at 101. Even assuming measurement errors, the gap is massive and it shows in the results on the ground.
Instead of weeding out the stupid and violent and otherwise genetically deficient, Western society today is doing the opposite. We are instead encouraging what evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton calls “spiteful mutants”. It may sound like something from a ’50s B-movie, but it may well explain much of what we see around us.
Spiteful mutants are the men in dresses demanding everyone pretend they are some third sex rather than a lunatic. These are the feminists who make war on the normal sexual relations of society. The people policing speech online and inflicting diversity, equity and inclusion programs are spiteful mutants. These are the human defects slowly making life impossible in Western countries.
Once, we had all manner of mechanisms, in addition to the death penalty, for keeping the spiteful mutants in their place. Since the ’60s, though, those mechanisms have been systematically dismantled.
We are now being overrun by them. Western societies are becoming unbearable due to the spiteful mutants. They have infected every aspect of society to the point where things are starting to break down. Even basic things like elections are proving impossible due to these mutants.
Holding an election is one of the simpler tasks for a society. People show up, then prove they are who they claim to be and that they are eligible to vote. Rational societies limit the franchise to those who have a stake in society. That means criminals and lunatics are not allowed to vote. The votes are then counted and the results are posted. The winners cheer and the losers promise to do better next time.
Takimag
But restricting criminals and nutcases from voting is now called “voter suppression”. Worse, even obviously brain-damaged semi-vegetables can not only vote, but get elected to the highest offices in the land.
Of course, all this is far from proven. But do they bear serious reflection?
Perhaps not. Just consider them a modest proposal.
