Eugenics, The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Clash of Two Systems
Today’s world is gripped between two possible futures: on the one hand, a multipolar alliance in defense of sovereign nation states has organized itself around a paradigm of long-term thinking, scientific optimism and win-win cooperation, while a unipolar paradigm of world government, depopulation and zero-sum thinking pushes a program of Great Resets, controlled pandemics and war.
Gaining insight into these two opposing paradigms is more important now than ever before, and one important place to start is the disturbing mind of Great Reset Architects who are today pushing society into a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” where it is believed that automation, and Artificial Intelligence will render most of humanity obsolete. As the World Economic Forum’s star philosopher Yuval Harari has repeatedly described this outlook: “Technology may disrupt human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways ranging from the creation of a global useless class to the rise of data colonialism and digital dictatorships”.
In the first article in this series, I reviewed the re-organization of the eugenics movement after WW2 as it followed Sir Julian Huxley’s demand that “the unthinkable be made, once again thinkable”.
In this second segment, we will leap back a little further in time to better understand what caused the rise of the perversion of science known as “eugenics” as a new scientific religion in the 19th century, before continuing with part three (From Russell to Wiener: The Rise of Cybernetics and Transhumanism).
The Closed System Assumptions of Social Darwinism
There are a few fundamental things that should be understood about the science of eugenics, otherwise known as “the science of cleansing the human gene pool of undesirable pollution” which emerged at the end of the 19th century.
This “science” grew out of the application of Darwin’s theories of natural selection and “survival of the fittest” to human society’s weeding out of the unfit and was premised on certain fundamental assumptions, not the least of which included: 1) that humanity is a system entirely shaped by material forces of environmental constraints and genetics, 2) that this system was fundamentally closed and hence entropic (subject to immutable laws of diminishing returns guided by an inevitable heat death), 3) that the creative force of genetic mutations guiding the appearance of new biological mechanisms was fundamentally random and 4) that this randomness could only be overcome by the rise of a new era of social engineers managing humanity on all levels-economic, psychological, cultural and even genetic.
Imagining the future age when the science of eugenics would replace world religions, the school’s founder Sir Francis Galton (cousin to Charles Darwin) mused in 1905: “It is easy to let the imagination run wild on the supposition of a whole-hearted acceptance of eugenics as a national religion”.
The Late 19th Century: A Clash of Two Systems
The paradigm shifting breakthroughs made in science and statecraft by the end of the 19th century resulted in a new petro-chemical/electronic age. New discoveries in atomic physics made by Beckerel, Roentgen, Curie, Rutherford, Planck and Einstein were additionally changing humanity’s idea of space, time, energy and matter. The practical application of these discoveries in the form of scientific and technological progress at the service of humanity was quickly destroying the foundations of Thomas Malthus’s supposed “laws of population” which assumed that human invention could never outpace nature’s limits always requiring a “scientific priesthood” to control population growth from above the control of nations.
Despite the fact that a genuine hope for a new age of discovery and progress was becoming realized, something darker was at play.
It was at this time that leading forces representing the British Empire were busy trying to resolve an existential challenge: National Sovereignty had proven itself much stronger than anticipated by the financier oligarchy centered in London and something new was emerging that could possibly undermine systems of Hobbesian “zero-sum” geopolitics forever.
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