Three inter-related disturbances of our times prompt this effort to make sense of them:
(1) Recycled eugenics theories, updated with climate concerns, seeking the culling of human population like livestock.
(2) Previously unthinkable and unimaginable destructions – of knowledge, privacy, family, food supply, health, safety, and economic well-being – losses that cannot be absorbed into common-sense perception, hence ignored and thrust out-of-sight.
(3) A pervasive state of undeclared war waged by shadowy groups with cybernetic, psychological, and biochemical weapons in addition to traditional kinetic weapons.
Eugenics theories have been espoused, surprisingly, by some of the most prestigious philosophers and social scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Their heritage informs the programs advanced by the most notorious mass murderers and by today’s techno-utopians.
The second post in this series reviews contemporary assaults on civilization inherent in the loss of knowledge, freedom, health, and other elementary conditions of life. The theoretical rationale for destruction of civilization being established, we then examine in the third post the unique qualities of this all-of-society warfare and what drives it.
Eugenics and Genocide From Social Darwinists to Techno-Utopians
Eugenics theories, from the mid-19th century onward, posited the existence of desirable or undesirable traits residing in individuals who could be scientifically identified and sorted. Desirable traits included robust health, mental superiority, moral rectitude; undesirable traits criminality, vice, weakness, mental illness. Merging the eschatology of the times with principles of livestock breeding, eugenicists sought ways to practice their new science in human society. Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin who coined the term eugenics, felt that 'the power of man over animal life, in producing whatever varieties of form he pleases, is enormously great'. He hoped 'to show more pointedly than [had] been attempted before, that mental qualities are equally under control'. He set forth a vision of regulating marriage so that ‘those who possessed the finest and most suitable natures, mental, moral, and physical [would produce] 'eminent servants of the state'. There is no mention in his writings of what might be done with those who don’t measure up, other than to suggest that ‘indiscriminate charity’ might be ‘non-eugenic’.
The possibility of the physical characteristics of animals changing in response to environmental pressures, favoring those that adapted best, first occurred to Charles Darwin during his Voyage of the Beagle from 1831 to 1836. Recognizing that natural selection was at odds with Divine Providence, Darwin delayed publishing The Origin of Species until 1859. Its impact then was not to overthrow religion, but to reinforce traditional notions of aristocracy in human society. Herbert Spencer applied Darwin’s discovery to human races, inventing the term survival of the fittest to account for the existence of superior and inferior human races. ‘This survival of the fittest’, he wrote, ‘is that which Mr Darwin has called natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.’ Like Galton, he believed that charitable intervention would upset the balance of nature and retard human improvement.
Eugenics advocates like Galton and Spencer claimed that the way societies sorted themselves into upper, middle, and lower classes was part of the natural order of things. Karl Marx has gotten a bad rap for merely substituting one dictatorship, that of the proletariat, for that of the hereditary aristocracy and merchant bourgeoisie, but let's give him credit for upsetting the social-Darwinist applecart by showing that their natural order was nothing of the sort. Not only that, but sorting people by desirable and undesirable traits betrayed a hopelessly primitive notion of human psychology; all of us have a complex mix of both, as 19th-century novels and any work of literature or drama aspiring to realistic sympathy show. Spencer’s million-fold compression of Darwin’s evolutionary time-frame, too, indicated a fatally flawed misunderstanding of evolution. These early advocates of eugenics also neglected to specify who would separate the unfit from the fit, an omission that has bedeviled their successors as well.
Yet the eugenecists’ quest to push Nature toward ‘improvement’ of the human species persisted despite all these disqualifying defects. In 1933, Julian Huxley (brother of Brave New World author Aldous), for example, urged redundantly that the unfit should be sterilized and prohibited from marrying. Among the traits he wished to perpetuate were administrative genius, poetry, humor, and beauty – all commendable no doubt, but hardly the stuff of natural selection. He emerged after World War II to become the first Director-General of UNESCO. Thirty American States followed the eugenecists’ advice and enacted laws resulting in the forced sterilization of 60,000 people deemed unfit. The U.S. Federal Government, similarly motivated, restricted immigration from Mediterranean countries and Asia from 1924 until the 1960s. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the 1927 Buck v Bell decision favoring compulsory sterilization of the ‘unfit’: ‘It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.’ This was the considered opinion of the most eminent jurist in America.
Popular authors like H G Wells and G B Shaw also threw their celebrity weight behind eugenics and sterilization of the unfit. Wells wrote in 1904, ‘The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born.’ Shaw’s eugenics preferences took a more explicitly violent direction in his guide for how socialism is to be achieved: ‘[I]f we desire a certain type of civilization and culture’, he wrote, ‘we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.’ Here Shaw can be seen in a 1931 newsreel articulating what would become Nazi sentiment: ‘If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight … then clearly, we cannot use the organizations of society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to you.’ An equal-opportunity fan of mass murder, the playwright urged Soviet Commissars in 1933 to shoot employees ‘so that he [the factory manager] might the more impressively ask the rest of the staff whether they yet grasped the fact that orders are meant to be executed’. Shaw’s Fabian Socialist associates echoed his sentiments.
Mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell wisely refrained from specifying the methods proposed to achieve world happiness, leaving the messy details to others. For world population to be kept ‘stationary’, he said, ‘There must not be many more people to be fed than there are now.’ Not a word from this exponent of linguistic exactitude about how world population is to be made ‘stationary’, nor who is to decide the fate of excess humankind.
J M Keynes, another member of the Bloomsbury set, attained renown as an economic savant for his advocacy of deficit spending. His legacy of trillions of dollars of government debt earned him the enduring gratitude of economic officials, who are never happier than when spending other people’s money. Less well-known is Lord Keynes’ lifelong predilection for… eugenics. From 1910 when he joined the Eugenics Society of Britain, to his 1946 Galton Lecture, he argued for reproduction restrictions under any and all demographic conditions. Wishing to appear both compassionate and hard-boiled, he hedged his language in order to have it both ways. In a 1923 letter to Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review, Keynes wrote, 'The coming generation of Americans will be forced by circumstances to consider the problem of what is the ideal population for their country, as well as the not less important problem of the quality of those who are bred up.' Here, Keynes presciently foresaw declining population as more of a problem than over-population. Nothing daunted, however, eugenics spoke to him as the solution of both problems. In 1927, at a dinner of the Malthusian League, Lord Keynes adopted his most oracular manner to intone, ‘In my opinion the battle [the threat of over-population] is now practically won — at least in this country.... Within our own lifetime the population of this island will cease to increase and will probably diminish.... I believe that for the future the problem of population will emerge in the much greater problem of heredity and Eugenics.’ In his final 1946 summing-up, he stated, ‘[F]rom my undergraduate days I have believed that in the long run nothing matters more to the human race than the possession of a sound genetic endowment.’ Whether population is increasing or declining, Lord Keynes’ prescription is the same: eugenics interventions.
In the same year, 1933, that Julian Huxley advocated sterilization of the unfit and G B Shaw urged shooting factory workers, the Nazi Party gained control of the German Government. Hitler lost no time in ‘following the science’ of such sterling pedigree, forcing at least 400,000 Germans to undergo sterilization due to conditions such as mental illness, epilepsy, blindness, ‘feeble-mindedness’, or physical deformities. Soon Hitler found a simpler definition of unfitness – Jewishness – that lent itself more readily to mass murder, at the same time engaging popular appeal. The twisted logic of exterminating a group that had reached the pinnacle of scientific, literary, and business achievement, for being unfit, demonstrates the madness of the Nazi enterprise. Yet it recurs, and even resonates, whenever and wherever misery and despair afflict a critical mass of the populace. In such times and places, officials seeking power or clinging to it call upon eugenics theories to support policies against all who might stand in their way.
Marx, as noted earlier, demolished the idea of social class being part of the natural order. Society, he urged, could be restructured by human effort, conscious social planning, and dedicated engineering. Nature itself could be overcome by human effort, according to Marx and his followers. Here we see the origins of today’s techno-utopians, who believe that human nature and planetary dynamics can be refashioned to their liking. Yet even the most advanced nations – having solved the economic problems of production, able to guarantee universal prosperity if they wished – have apparently chosen not to do so. We will consider that mystery a little further below.
The Soviet Communists sought to create a New Soviet Man who could abolish History, Nature, and all other constraints by sheer will-power. The architectural monstrosities they designed in fealty to that ideal are still visible in the urban landscapes of Moscow and what was then called Leningrad. Their infatuation with Lysenko-ism, the belief that acquired characteristics could be inherited, derived from that same arrogant belief in their own inevitable triumph over nature. The Lysenko-ists foreshadowed later scientists' fixation on genetic engineering, though in the 1930s the Lysenko crowd lacked the technical know-how. Nearby in Germany, the Nazis developed a remarkably similarly theory of the Ubermensch / Superman who also defied Nature and justified setting their own Nordic breed above all others. They professed racial superiority, while the Communists professed intellectual superiority, but the salient feature of both was the inherent right of a small god-like cadre to determine the fate of humanity.
The Soviet Communists used rather primitive methods of slaughter – guns and bullets, famines, habitat destruction – that were essentially no different from methods that had been used for centuries. A progressive ideology, enshrined in the culinary metaphor of breaking eggs to make omelettes, garnered support from intellectuals both inside and outside the Soviet Union. Legal and political theatrics were deployed to kill millions. The Nazis, for their part, industrialized genocide with purpose-built death factories served by an efficient trans-European rail transport system. Being of a more racial persuasion than the multi-cultural Soviets, Nazis focused their efforts on eliminating Jews from Europe, though they did not neglect to include, among those to be slaughtered, fellow-nationals who sheltered Jews. They hoped to purify the human race by removing an ethnic contaminant from the genestock.
Techno-utopianism merged the exaggerated self-esteem of the scientific Communists with the older aristocratic notions embedded in social-Darwinism. Thus they roped Darwin and Marx into the same corral. Scientific expertise enabled the techno-utopians to bypass moral restraint, at the same time projecting the appearance of a natural aristocracy privy to the secrets of the universe. The common run of humanity, viewed from above, appeared to them as an amorphous depersonalized mass. Given this perception, medical experiments resulting in mass death would incur no moral cost, and could even be rationalized as serving a ‘greater good’. For this feat of ethical legerdemain to work, the killing methods had to be technically advanced and remotely executed.
Practical knowledge of the enormous energy encapsulated in the tiniest particles of matter made mass murder orders of magnitude more efficient than previously. The brilliant coterie of nuclear physicists assembled by the Manhattan Project developed the technique of incinerating whole cities and their inhabitants in an instant. Firestorms may have claimed more victims, but the only use of nuclear weapons in war to have occurred so far targeted a racial group, the Japanese, regarded by those responsible as inferior. For a generation the nuclear priesthood commanded the heights of scientific terror, directing advances in bomb design, missile ballistics, and nuclear strategy. In the course of time this priesthood was displaced by an even more thorough priesthood specializing in remote mass murder. Bio-weapons rendered airplanes, bombs, and missiles obsolete, as lab-engineered pathogens could be spread in aerosols by the wind – a natural distribution system – and by their own infectious proliferation.
Why Rich Nations Don't Choose Universal Prosperity
By the mid-20th century, scientific ingenuity and organization of industry had seemingly solved the problems of production in advanced nations. Continuing advances in information systems made human labor obsolete in many areas, generating aggregate wealth in such abundance that universal prosperity could be guaranteed if shared. Why do tech-oligarchs not wish it? Why keep an ever-increasing portion of humanity in penury if aggregate scarcity doesn’t force it? While the richest continue to amass fortunes equivalent to the GDPs of medium-sized nations, their political virtue-signaling facilitates their capture of Government regulatory agencies in (for example) the finance, pharmaceutical, and defense industries, re-directing them toward massive taxpayer subsidies. But this only tells us how oligarchs enrich themselves at everyone else’s expense; it doesn’t tell us why. Expressions of discontent like the guillotine set up for Jeff Bezos outside his Washington DC mansion suggest that enormous wealth doesn’t buy them public esteem. Corporate expenditures on executives’ personal security – bodyguards, private jets, bulletproof office glass, escape chutes, and so on – testify to how widely despised such oligarchs are. While they truly enjoy luxury, the private jets and the bodyguard entourage are primarily for protection. From inside that gilded bubble, their fear and loathing of the common run of humanity is palpable.
In the movie Chinatown, Detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) asks Noah Cross (John Huston) what can he buy with all his wealth. 'The future, Mr Gidds, the future', Cross informs him. To control the future, to build a huge city in the desert, Noah Cross had to control the water supply. And if that meant subduing Nature to his advantage, causing artificial droughts, uprooting farmers, then so be it. The ambitions of today's oligarchs extend right around the whole planet, to geo-engineering, buttressed by enviro-babble about climate change mitigation. Hurling thunderbolts or clouding the sun, in blind pursuit of unattainable temperature differentials, their mad schemes merge grossly oversized self-esteem with their murderous impulses toward humanity.
Today’s oligarchs crave recognition for saving the planet. They think there are too many of us. They want to cull the human population, and eagerly grasp any apparently scientific rationale toward that end. Dennis Meadows, a co-author of The Club of Rome’s 1972 Report The Limits to Growth, pioneered the format that has since become familiar from repeated usage, mixing opaque computer models with apocalyptic forecasts to produce pre-determined conclusions. Having consulted this oracle, Meadows informs us our planet can support only one billion or perhaps two billion of us. Here he can be heard holding forth: ‘The planet can support [waves arms in circular motion] something like a billion people. Maybe two billion. Depends on how much liberty and how much material consumption you want.... We're now at seven [billion] so we have to get back down.’ Squeamish about violence, he hopes it can be done in a ‘civil’ way. While their calculations decree that billions of souls must be snuffed out for the greater good, a sudden silence descends on their deliberations when they come to methods. ‘One way or another’ is the usual answer.
The genealogy of their ideas traces a direct line of descent from the 19th-century social Darwinists (Galton, Spencer, et al), through the early 20th-century eugenics ideas of the fading British aristocracy (J Huxley), picked up by the German Nazis in the 1930s, recycled by the population-bomb crowd and scientized by the afore-mentioned 1972 Club of Rome Report and others who espouse the eugenecist cause. Contemporary eugenecists don't use terms like 'survival of the fittest' anymore. Adopting the language of the climate cult, now it’s all about saving the planet. Killing a few billion people is in their estimation a valuable public service. As Professor Bill McGuire, vulcanologist and climate scientist, put it in May 2024, 'The only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.' The carnage inflicted by the lab-crafted covid virus and its purported gene-transfer remedy are undeniable as of the date of this statement. Instead of denying these facts, Professor McGuire adroitly blends the beliefs of the climate cult, the covidian cult, and the eugenics cult into one apocalyptic nowcast.
The techno-utopians brandishing bio-weaponry have a well-meaning though incoherent rationale revolving around 'saving the planet' from the normal human activities of growing and eating food, breathing, moving from one place to another, and seeking prosperity. Human existence itself, it seems according to their warped view, threatens the earth. The proposition is never stated so directly, because simply stringing together, AI-like, a bunch of ridiculous assertions is enough to persuade many. ‘Mitigation’ is the current (mid-2024) buzzword that crops up most often in speeches and reports as euphemism for habitat and agricultural destruction leading to genocide. Killing off whatever portion of humanity might bend the arc of computer-projected food / population ratio toward parity could mitigate the harmful effects of humanity on the planet. World Bank experts seeking ‘Net Zero Emissions in the Agrifood System’ declare ‘The Agrifood System Has a Big Climate Problem’. To solve it, they propose feed additives to reduce bovine methane emissions (also known as cow farts) and ‘breeding low-emission cattle’; if that doesn’t do the trick, culling cattle and substituting they offer lab-grown and insect protein. Plus, for only $260 billion per year, the ‘temperature targets enshrined in the Paris Agreement’ could be ours (emphasis added). Get that? ‘Enshrined’, as if this unratified document were holy writ brought down from Mount Ararat. Exactly how the quarter-trillion-plus dollars would be used isn’t specified, but the proposed satellite surveillance system to spy on growers’ emissions could easily soak up a big share of that budget. ‘Geo-engineering’ – blocking sunlight by increasing cloud cover – could absorb another large share of taxpayers’ involuntary contributions. Wafting aluminum nano-particles into the atmosphere cuts agricultural production while giving those who inhale the nano-particles dementia, as documented in Dane Wingington’s film The Dimming. What better way to establish superiority to the common run of humanity than to use bio-chemical subterfuge to destroy the habitats and lives of a few billion people, mimicking Nature herself.
The victims of this slaughter are disproportionately the unaware, the passive, the gullible, the most inclined to do as they're told, the most likely to succumb to pressure and psychological manipulation, the most prone to allow their innate common-sense to be overwhelmed by injunctions to ‘follow the science’ – to their graves. Paradoxically, many of the most gullible and easily manipulable are highly educated people, capable of absorbing prodigious quantities of information. But their contempt of common-sense and lack of 'street-smarts' makes them victims of the cult of expertise. It is very hard to wrap a highly educated mind around health agencies, doctors, and drug companies killing and sickening patients who trust them to provide medical care. But in addition to the many deaths caused by the officially approved Rx of remdesivir and forced-air blown into the lungs, the very mRNA injections advertised and pushed as covid treatment have killed 600,000 people in the United States, according to cardiologist and internest Dr Peter McCullough, and 17 million world-wide, according to Dr Denis Rancourt (through mid-2024). Pfizer knew from its own pre-sales internal testing how deadly their mRNA injections were. Excess death figures rising in tandem with rising numbers of mRNA injections strongly imply causality, which is clinically confirmed by autopsies identifying mRNA-generated spike proteins in vital organs that failed. The bio-pharmaceutical complex is administering slow annihilation. But this cannot be!, say the trusting souls who would wish it away.
Public officials nullifying First Amendment free speech, promoting criminal violence, destroying energy resources domestically and overseas, depressing purchasing power, provoking nuclear war – these things cannot happen in a civilized country. Especially for those whose careers in law, medicine, science, and business immerse them in rational pursuits, such things are off the radar screen, as if they did not exist. People in fields such as construction, civil engineering, transportation, energy, and farming, on the other hand, must pay attention to their physical surroundings as an integral part of their work. They trust their innate common-sense, transcending narrow disciplinary categories to find practical solutions. Pattern-recognition ability enables some to perceive links between apparently unconnected observations. They don’t necessarily distrust officials and experts, but personal experience has more credibility for them than what they are told by the media to believe. Even for this group, it is very hard to accept the existence of such thorough malevolence. It is profoundly threatening merely to imagine that people so radically different from themselves in basic moral sensibility can and do commit such awful crimes.
There is no shortage of apocalyptic warnings bristling with vague allusions to diabolical forces coordinating all these disasters. Various ideological death cults do dream of global annihilation, in hopes of picking up the pieces after the cataclysm; but the high level of controlled centralized planning required to foment sustainable chaos is fortunately beyond their capacity. Though the covidian and climate cults have killed millions, their more extensive genocidal ambitions are at the moment (mid-2024) more aspirational than actual. Nevertheless some mental preparation for the very different world that is already upon us is advisable. Perhaps these posts will be of use in that endeavor.
The second one will consider the assault on knowledge, privacy, family, food supply, health, safety, and economic well-being; each one an unimaginable departure from the pre-1960s common-sense perspective. Schools and Government-dominated media have disqualified themselves from their traditional tasks of providing practical knowledge and enhancing powers of independent thought. The way to break the grip of those institutions on your mindspace is to turn off the television and social media, stop the newspaper subscriptions, and do your own research. Find independent, original and out-of-the-way sources on-line and off-line. Inspect conflicts-of-interest – if someone is receiving financial or career rewards for adopting a certain line, chances are his publication will favor the sponsor. Common-sense awareness, close observation of surroundings, and self-education form the basis of the mental preparation required to navigate current realities.
The third post in this series will describe the pervasive state of undeclared war that we are currently living through, a war waged by ill-defined combatants more (thus far) with bio-weapons and psy-ops than with traditional kinetic weapons. Awareness of the sources and effects of these wars is the first step toward self-protection and recovery of the resources civilization must have to survive.
“Too many white people” is Eugenics…