For all the talk of how incompetent our elites are, there’s one area where they show remarkable skill and determination: relentlessly creating conditions to shorten the lifespans of the disabled, poor, and working class.
Let’s look at just a few of the many examples before examining potential reasons it’s becoming so much more brazen.
In the US, policies to hurt the working poor and disabled are nothing new, but they’ve exploded in scope in recent years. Elites have collectively memory-holed an ongoing pandemic that has thus far officially killed more than 1.2 million (although that number is likely much higher), disabled many more, and fallen disproportionately on the working class and disabled.
At the same time, any assistance is being snatched away. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy was falling as policies on homelessness and addiction to wages and healthcare were designed to ensure working class Americans break down mentally and physically and receive little to no assistance once they do.
The US might not have assisted dying like other countries (as we’ll see here in a minute), but there is no shortage of booze and pills that perform the trick. And what Angus Deaton and Anne Case first called “deaths of despair” in 2015 has only been getting worse with time.
We’re now embracing salmonella in food and even have a homeless industrial complex because of course there’s always money to be made even during a culling of the herd.
Despite the MAGA and MAHA slogans, social policy is now officially entering an era of eugenics as the unifying theme of the Trump administration is an embrace of the idea that the “strong” will survive. Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” currently making its way through Congress is designed to force the most vulnerable to sink or swim on their own. Here’s just one example from Ohio:
Earlier this year, the Ohio House passed a budget proposal with a dangerous provision: If the federal government ever reduces its contribution to Medicaid, Ohio would immediately revoke health insurance for more than 750,000 Ohioans.
I understand the desire for fiscal responsibility — but eliminating life-saving programs isn’t responsible. It’s cruel.
I’ve lived with cerebral palsy my entire life. I rely on 10 hours of Medicaid-funded home care each day through Ohio’s Individual Options (I/O) waiver. This care helps me live independently at Creative Living, a supportive community in Columbus for people with disabilities. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed, manage my health, or live on my own.
My income is $1,528 per month from Supplemental Security Income (SSI). That modest amount covers my rent, groceries, and basic needs. Without Medicaid, I’d lose my independence — and possibly my home. I’d be forced to rely on my aging parents, who can’t provide the kind of intensive care I need.
Losing Medicaid would introduce a huge unknown into my life. I have a loving family I could lean on — but many people don’t. I honestly don’t know what my life would look like without it: no home care, no therapy, no transportation, no housing. I’d lose rental support, medical care, and the freedom to move or live like any other bachelor in his mid-30s.
Even my wheelchair could become a luxury — something easy enough to axe.
The US official line is now openly that such weak people simply aren’t worth the investment:
In case it’s not clear to some people, this is classic eugenicist rhetoric and a core feature of fascist politics. It implies that sick and disabled people are failing ‘the nation’ and are thus a burden to be stigmatized, shamed, and eliminated. pic.twitter.com/esdqmkSClP
— Eric Reinhart (@_Eric_Reinhart) May 12, 2025
In the telling of RFK Jr. and friends, public healthcare coddles the weak, which is real soft Nazi stuff. As Derek Beres puts it:
By avoiding discussion of education, employment, social support networks, economic status and geographic location – the social determinants that public health experts agree influence health outcomes – Kennedy, in lockstep with top wellness influencers, is practicing soft eugenics.
But let’s not forget that the Biden administration was in some cases outdoing the current one:
Est. number of people GOP bill would kick off Medicaid: 8.6 million
Number of people Biden’s FY23 budget kicked off Medicaid: 25.2 million
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) May 16, 2025
And helped pave the way for our ongoing eugenics project:
The “covid is only a threat to the vulnerable” narrative primed the pump for the eugenics movement we’re seeing now.
It conditioned people to see the disabled & vulnerable as acceptable losses. People who were probably going to “die anyways”.
It paved the way for fascism.
— Kelly (@broadwaybabyto) May 12, 2025
It’s a similar story across the rest of the West.
In Canada, even the UN is weighing in recommending that the country stop offering its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), writing that the Canadian government will provide suffering people with disabilities access to death, without making sure they have the support they need to live.
And Canada’s MAID industrial complex stands alongside the homeless version in the US as pillars of North American eugenics:
1/ Ever hear of a “charity” that lobbies like Big Oil? Meet Dying With Dignity Canada (DWDC). Since 2020, this group pushing assisted dying has quietly amassed outsized influence in Ottawa. Their lobbying might shock you. Buckle up for some facts.
— Kurt Goddard (@kurtgoddard) March 30, 2025
In the UK, the government is looking to cut disability benefits and deny pensioners winter fuel assistance — although the Starmer Labour government might be backing down a little on the latter (or just trying to get it out of the news cycle for a time).
At the same time, London is also considering an assisted dying bill for the terminally ill, although it is facing pushback over the fact that a broken healthcare system could push people to end their lives rather than enjoy a proper informed choice.
The cuts to disability benefits will decimate quality of life, erode services, and lead to earlier deaths, but that appears to be the point. Again, though, this is nothing new. A report published last year by the Institute of Health Equity at University College London, finds that between 2011 and 2019, 1,062,334 premature deaths were recorded among individuals living outside the wealthiest 10% of areas in England mostly due to poverty and austerity measures.
Across the EU, years of austerity were causing a decline in life expectancy among the poor even before the pandemic, which made matters worse. The European elite are determined to keep going, however, with “rearmament” coupled with more social austerity, ostensibly to pay for the weapons that will grant Europe “security.”
The following is from Canada but I think is largely correct and applies across much the Western world:
Let’s be honest, Canada and other countries have /been/ executing their poor; they’ve just never been so brazen about it.
— tenrec77, onto bluer skies. (@tenrec77) November 15, 2022
Why So Brazen?
What is central to all these Western countries? Neoliberalism. Is it surprising that an ideology that says markets are more important than people would completely hand over social policy to the wealthiest and embrace eugenics?
At the same time it is being turbocharged by the pandemic, climate change, and the rise of hierarchical tech weasels.
Let’s look at these converging and reinforcing threads one by one.
Neoliberal Ideology
A recent government analysis of the impact of a bill to legalise assisted suicide in England and Wales suggested that public bodies could save more than 100 million pounds a year in health and social care costs, benefits and pensions.
A 2020 report from Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Office estimated savings at $87 million – a fraction of Canada’s $264 billion healthcare costs that year.
These types of analyses—as well as suggestions from the MAHA crowd that the sick and disabled are failing the nation—treat life as dollar figures on a spreadsheet, and those that don’t offer sufficient return aren’t worth the investment.
It’s reminiscent of a chapter in the formative days of Israel, which is fitting considering the West’s current support for genocide in Palestine and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s belief that the future belongs to authoritarian capitalism.
As Laura Robson puts it in her book, Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work, many of the survivors left in the [concentration] camps after the war would be unfit as laborers of any kind, anywhere. And so the leaders fighting for land that would soon become Israel were faced with loads of unproductive Jewish Holocaust survivors being a drain on the soon-to-be state. What did they do?
In the battle for Latrun during the 1948 war, the Israel Defense Forces deployed just-arrived Holocaust survivors in battle with as little as three days’ military training, dooming many of them to instant death. In postwar reckonings, critics would charge over and over again that even Ben-Gurion—even Israel—had seen these remaining Jewish refugees as little more than “cannon fodder.”
That seems an apt description for how the most vulnerable are increasingly treated today. Ultimately, it comes down to the question of social values, and the choice for elites across the West is clear.
Public bodies are increasingly cash-strapped as money goes to “supporting” Ukraine and cutting taxes for billionaires. And so, as Disability News Service puts it, they’re incentivized “to suggest the option of an assisted suicide to a terminally-ill patient or service-user as a cheaper option than continuing to provide them with expensive health and social care services.”
While RFK Jr. and company worry about the disabled needing assistance, here’s a breakdown of the US budgetary priorities from the “big, beautiful bill::
And here’s some of the data on America’s obscene wealth inequality, courtesy of ZZ’s Blog:
● Total US wealth in 2024 was $148 trillion.
● The share of total US wealth held by the 0.00001% of households was, by far, the greatest since 1913, when the US income tax system originated.
● JP Morgan Chase estimates that there were 2,000 billionaires in the US in 2024; 975 in 2021.
● The top 0.1% of households constitute approximately 133,000 households and each holds an average of $46.3 million in wealth, accumulating $3.4 million a year since 1990 (Steven Frazzari, Washington University, St. Louis).
● The next 0.9% of households– approximately 1.2 million households– were each worth $11.2 million and grew by $450,000 per year in the same period (Frazzari).
● The cumulative 1% of households account for 34.8% of total US wealth in 2023.
Silicon Valley Hierarchicalism
The eugenics flowing out of Silicon Valley these days have always found fertile ground there dating back at least as far as the founding of Stanford University in 1885. Let’s take a moment to compare Leland Stanford’s horse breeding with the Valley’s current greatest success story: the world’s richest man Elon Musk. Malcolm Harris includes the fascinating and frightening horse-breeding activities of Stanford around the time he founded the university that bares his name. From our review of the book last year:
Stanford didn’t particularly care about horses or their well-being:
Stanford was not content to own horses, nor was he content to own the fastest horses in all the land. He saw himself engaged in a serious scientific campaign regarding the improved performance of the laboring animal –– hippology, or equine engineering. For Stanford the capitalist, the horses were productive biological machines, and in races he could analyze their output according to simple, univocal metrics.
Stanford figured that if he could increase the value of each horse by $100, that would be worth $1.3 billion (more than $30 billion in 2022 money) to the US, which had approximately 13 million horses.
And he wasn’t even concerned with the horses’ adult speed; he instead had his farm optimize the horses for visible potential. He disrupted the horse industry. Sure, by forcing colts to basically run before they could walk, there were plenty of snapped tendons, and “good material” was “spoiled,” but in Stanford’s eyes this weeded out the weak.
The university helped transfer this idea from horses to humans, and this type of thinking remains prevalent in Silicon Valley. Musk, with his megaphone, is simply the loudest voice among this crowd. And while he decries falling birth rates, his idea of pronatalism is like Stanford’s equine engineering but for all of us:
The tech billionaire frequently invokes IQ, a flawed and long-debated measure of intelligence. His fever dream of a crumbling civilization can only be salvaged when “smart” people pump out more babies. What constitutes a smart person, he doesn’t make explicit, though in tech-natalist circles they usually mirror the entrepreneurs declaring the mandate. To that end, Musk has personalized his advocacy for pronatalism by challenging himself to help “seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence”.
Climate and Resources
In January 2020, the Climate Declaration of over 11,000 climate scientists called for policies to reduce population growth stating:
Economic and population growth are among the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. . . . therefore, we need bold and drastic transformations regarding economic and population policies. . . . [T]he world population must be stabilized–and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity. There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on [greenhouse gas] emissions and biodiversity loss. These policies make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women.
Perhaps there is a responsible, human-rights-protecting way to do this, and maybe it’s necessary, especially if the world’s wealthiest— the top 10% caused two thirds of global warming since 1990—refuse to adjust their lifestyle. But with policy in the hands of a neoliberal, tech hierarchical elite, it’s not looking good.
The recent embrace by some liberals of Trump’s screw-the-poor policies for their climate tailings omits any mention of how such actions fall disproportionately on the poor and disabled. One wonders if depopulation factors into their support, yet their sophistication doesn’t allow them to mention it while they admire Trump for openly doing the dirty work.
And in the US, Democrats embrace eugenics just the same, albeit in different, focus-grouped language, which is this go-round solidifying around “Abundance.” It’s sold as less red tape to build more housing and a bright future for more. In reality, it’s simply doubling down on servitude to the new tech lords and the power of the market—the same forces currently driving our eugenicist dystopia.
The parties remain one of the same despite the howls of Trump racism, but as Quinn Slobodian puts it, Trump and the Silicon Valley crowd are “less a fascism of blood and soil than a nihilistic capitalism of the bottom line”.
Panic
As Western governments fail to try to contain the rise of countries like China, Western capital looks to have settled on a strategy to find a way out of its profitability crisis.
Source: Michael Roberts’ Blog
Even if Western oligarchs don’t necessarily hold fascist positions, the quest for profit would likely pull them in that direction. David de Jong’s 2022 book Nazi Billionaires follows five families – the Quandts, the Flicks, the von Fincks, the Porsche-Piëchs and the Oetkers – through their closeness to the Nazi regime and postwar, where they remained among the country’s wealthiest families.
What stood out was that they weren’t necessarily believers in anything at all to do with Aryan superiority or Jewish inferiority. They believed in money. And thought they could make more with Hitler, and as Adam Tooze has pointed out, they did – for a time:
SS planners hoped for even more as they prepared to capitalize on the fruits of victory and the exploitation of the defeated as the biggest prize of all was to be Russia. Alas it was not meant to be, and it doesn’t look as though it will come to pass this go round either as you saw those same hopes today for the breakup of Russia in order to return to 1990s-style plunder when the US’ best and brightest sucked hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country with devastating results.
And so we’re now witnessing an acceleration of the effort to exploit local populations, maybe best summed up here:
Property developer and CEO Tim Gurner: “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.” pic.twitter.com/la3ibCDCsp
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) September 12, 2023
Boredom
It’s worth a mention. Perhaps another in the long list of reasons to tax billionaires out of existence is to prevent them from having too much time on their hands to become connoisseurs of young blood (ala Peter Thiel) and develop grand designs for population re-engineering.
Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska, the CEO and general counsel of Palantir, respectively, wrote in their recent book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, about some of the engineering we’re already seeing. Here’s Unpopular Front on The Technological Republic:
It becomes clear in the course of reading this “Technological Republic” the authors propose is essentially some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to “ruthlessly” pursue “outcomes.” It’s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: “no public “oversight for me, surveillance for thee.”
…To recap, Karp wrote his dissertation on a form of rhetoric that employs aggression to bind a community together and then he goes and writes a terrible, jargon-filled, cliché-riddled book about how the United States needs to rearm with the help of Silicon Valley. The shittiness, one might say, is the point: is Karp intentionally using jargon in this technical sense to create his own vision of Volksgemeinschaft? Maybe, but the rhetoric is not stirring! As for “aggression in the life-world,” Karp is saying “Yes, please!” In the book, Karp explicitly says how he wants to cultivate a more martial society to defend “the West.”
While these Silicon Valley weasels are no doubt delusional enough to believe that engineering a nation of “high-IQ” individuals will help lead to eventual victory over China and Russia and global domination, for now “defending the West” means from those in its midst who aren’t “contributors” or those who oppose its support for genocide in its imperial outposts. As Edward Ongweso Jr. writes after a January visit to CES, behind all the ridiculously obvious AI and crypto scams lurks the very real danger of the self-reinforcing neoliberal structures built by the titans of death:
It threatens to narrow our institutional imagination to the dreams of monopolistic firms and flood the zone with propaganda to reinforce these nightmarish visions, rehabilitate reactionary ideologies that pine for the ancien régime, and serves to enrich some of the least among us: white South Africans who don’t seem to have gotten over the end of apartheid. The concern about the Subprime AI crisis, as Ed Zitron puts it, is that it will not only misallocate resources in a bubble that’ll burst and leave behind immiserated masses, dessicated public institutions, and an increasingly withered capacity for political action not aligned with Wall Street/Silicon Valley’s interests BUT that it’ll empower masters of the universe like Peter Thiel who seem interested in building the worst possible future for all but themselves.
Thank you, Conor.
As I read the post, I thought of the heiresses to the Barney Barnato fortune, Esther Rantzen and her daughter, and their lobbying for assisted dying in the UK. I also thought of an heiress to the Cayzer fortune, Labour MP Stella Creasy, and her, what I thought to be distasteful, celebration when abortion was liberalised in Northern Ireland.
I worked at Deutsche Bank when Nazi Billionaires was published and was surprised that American oligarchs like the Bush and Ford families were not mentioned. They were part of the Nazi war machine until 1942, if not later.
A very good friend’s grandfather was a senior sergeant in the 29th American (Blue and Grey) Division. As such, he was stationed in Bremerhaven at war’s end. His story was that one night he and the other sergeants were called out to put down a serious riot among their own troops. It seems that some GIs had discovered oil drums in the U-boat base marked Standard Oil of California, 1944. Then a pair of Americans, who were the oil companies “field representatives” were discovered trying to “repatriate” these “American owned items.” The GIs were getting ready to hang these two Americans as traitors. Add to this IBMs field representatives who were attached to the American forces at the, and sometimes ahead of, the front line who worked to save IBM property in Germany from destruction or theft, and we get an early example of the fully amoral nature of Neo-liberal businesses.
Basil Zaharoff would have approved.
I hope your equine ventures have prospered. Stay safe.
The amorality of neoliberalism and its antecedents lives on. New generations get subjected to tightening screws, limited opportunities and precarity by those who rationalize every new twist in logic to justify efficiency.
That is the mythical touchstone of modern economics. If only those darn humans, meaning the lower orders, really meaning the vast majority, would stop insisting on wanting some control over their lives. AI threatens to accelerate that march to the efficient frontier and bleeding edge.
Efficiency in economics is an ideological Matryoshka Doll — every time you think you know what it means, you get to another form of it.
First you think economists just mean physical efficiency, where a given unit of work is performed using less energy. Then you find out it really means the price that clears the market fastest. Next you stumble across the idea that if a person with a billion calories of food is compelled to give 100 calories to a person with only 50 calories, then it is not Pareto efficient.
The final form is what I call Boeing efficient, after what LJ Hart-Smith wrote in his notorious study of Boeing outsourcing: “A corollary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is that perfect efficiency exists only when no work is being done.” One can conclude from this that the optimal least cost solution is to take money for an aircraft that will fly, but then not deliver the product. You will not arrive at your destination, but you will arrive at the Phishing Equilibrium.
If the choice comes down to barbarism or socialism, billionaires can be trusted to choose barbarism every time.
Thank you, Ambrit.
I haven’t invested this season.
It’s been a good flat season so far. Some upsets.
The Derby is on Saturday week.
I go to Ascot in three weeks with a Yorkshire rose.
Colonel Smithers, I used to spend a significant amount of my time around race tracks in Southern California (Santa Anita, Del Mar, and especially the old Hollywood Park).
Would love to hear about your favorite handicapping methods some time.
My guess is that our politics are quite different but I am a firm believer that a love of racing can sometimes transcend political differences.
Thank you.
I rarely invest and have no particular method.
I’ve been going to the races for six decades and enjoy the atmosphere. I’m very interested in breeding, training and equine art.
You’re right about the sport of kings transcending politics. I’m a socialist in case you are wondering.
During confinement, I had the idea that capitalism has been misclassified as an economic system when it feels much closer to a death cult. I am not qualified to even consider that idea a theory. I just wish somebody could explain how I’m wrong. It would be much better for my mental health.
michael aubert: The Italian philosopher Donatella di Cesare, who is also a Germanist and scholar of Hannah Arendt, uses the term necropolitica (death-politics, which she first brought up in an essay in 2022).
So you aren’t an outlier. Di Cesare has been very active lately on Italian television, not the normal venue of professors of philosophy, where she is highly effective. She is Jewish and has been a sharp critic of the Israeli government (Italy allows much more debate on Palestine than German or England do).
See McKenzie Wark’s 2014 essay, Birth of Thanaticism:
https://publicseminar.org/2014/04/birth-of-thanaticism/
Excellent post. Well written. Scary future we have ahead of us.
“The love of money is the root of all evil.”
I think saying the ownership/ruling class believes in anything – even eugenics – is giving them too much credit.
All they want is more people entering employment “contracts” (because otherwise it’s just old fashioned slavery, right?) under duress so they get a bigger piece of the pie. Sick family with no support, high unemployment, general desperation are all means to that end.
Nothing new here. Greenspan famously attributed economic growth to “growing worker insecurity” back in 97’. And that was because of policy going back 20-30 years prior.
Greenspan, who was shocked, Shocked, that the economy and human behavior didn’t conform to his models. What a guy, playing with the lives of millions. /:
Musk is the billionaires’ Id, daring to act out in public what most or all believe. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that our primary enemy is not the State, certainly not the moribund Church, nor even Capitalism per se. It’s these few hundred billionaires and soon, their AI enforcers.
Henry Moon Pie. Hmmmm.
–War is the health of the state, Randolph Bourne. So one foe is the state engorged with blood by making war as an economic policy. War to keep the populace in line and to encourage profiteering. Necropolitica, as I mention above.
–The church, that is, U.S. Protestantism, truly has gone into terminal decline. Causes? Are people tired of the Beatitudes? Solutions? Something besides the prosperity gospel, conversions of nutcases like J.D. Vance and Newt Gingrich to Catholicism, and the swamp that is “I’m spiritual but not religious.”
–Not even capitalism per se. Admit it, capitalism is past its prime. See necropolitica. And poor Garvey, whom Conor Gallagher quotes, writing that he “understands the need for fiscal responsibility.” Next stop, the gas chambers.
–Musk and the billionaires. When I see Musk peddling himself as the superior “race,” I wonder. He’s an ugly clown. This is the best that “white people” have to offer? Oh, I forgot. There’s Hillary Clinton and Victoria Nuland and Madeleine Albright, the white-lady warmongers, too.
–A few hundred billionaires. That’s an argument for a new Baader-Meinhoff gang. I’m not yet prepared to argue that course of action.
I’ll add to your list Jeffery Epstein and his “ranch” where he evidently was carrying out a plan to personally “improve” the gene pool for Terran humanity.
Next up, le Droit de Seigneur? (Enabled through Cop(ulate)GPT.)
Thank you, Ambrit.
As editor of the Spectator, Johnson, rumoured to be plotting a comeback, exercised the droit de seigneur.
I had heard rumours that “pigs” worked at the Spectator, but this tidbit confirms those rumours.
Also, where are Addison and the original Steele when we need them?
As for Johnson; does he ever stop plotting?
Stay safe.
Yes, Joseph Addison and Jane Austen, the two most lucid English writers. If you want to be a communicator study the way they use their language.
A longer view and a global perspective offer some relief from this bleak picture. The U.S. can pull up the drawbridge and become a Hobbesian jungle, but many other nations are unlikely to follow this path. Eventually the contrast between our decline and the better situation of others with spark reform. The fortunes of nations follow long waves of historical change. The Onion headline that accurately sums up modern America also offers hope: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”
That headline was surely about school shootings.
I am concerned that any “relief” we are to receive will be of the “ misery loves company” variety.
The fatal flaw hierarchical tech weasels make is confusing the living with the digital. Left to their mechanizations, there will be no new thinking, replaced with a murky stew of yesterday’s ideas sloppily mixed together by AI, the tea leaves left to be interpreted by whomever is in charge (AI again?). I have to wonder if AI considers our existential crisis as concerning as I do. It seems the answer is no by design.
Thank you Conor.
If you assume the ruling class actually recognizes that global warming due to human overconsumption is a real problem, then the ‘why’ really answers itself.
If they really are able to obviate 80% or whatever of human labor with AI, expect the pace of this to greatly accelerate.
Fun fact, if they increase AI use, they increase global warming.
Self defeating all around.
Not if the goal is to exterminate 7 billion or so people over the next hundred years and make it look
like an accident.
Jackpot design engineering.
The one main problem ruling elites have had throughout history is those pesky lower orders who just won’t do what they are told or act the way they want them to. I suspect there are at least a few embracing AI and so on because they think it can replace the lower orders with something compliant to them.
The root concept underlying all the above manifestations is Social Darwinism.
This is alive and well and underpins the notions of many of the current political elite, globally.
Herbert Spencer corrupted the science of evolution, basically for political ends, both to justify ‘laissez faire’, and the increasing inequalities of British 19thC capitalism during the 1870s. It then fed into the US Golden Age and robber baron era, now being replicated by 47.
It has probably been best rebutted in Kropotkin’s writings.
Social Darwinists believe in “survival of the fittest”.
This is the idea is that the most successful people are innately fitter, so better, more able and more intelligent.
The main criterion is wealth, so the wealthiest are automatically considered as the most able and hence ought to be the most entitled.
“Fitness” is proportional to wealth.
The Tubes observation of the entitlement of the young and rich got it spot on…
” With everything I desire
Filling every room
Everything I need–and maybe
Some more things I don’t need, you know”
Muskrat’s hubris is entirely down to his personal superiority. He also identifies that his personal “fitness” is defined by his reproductive success. Pure Social Darwinism.
With Social Darwinist thinking $1 has more power than 1 vote, and oligarchy and fascism are the logical end state.
Of course the poor are deemed genetically inferior, ‘untermensch’ and this is part of the elitism of Nietzsche that leads to fascism and racism. A new manifestation might be Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism.
Jews were untermensch – so sub human under Nazism, just as Palestinians are now the ‘human animals’ of Zionism, not even a century later.
The power elite has fewer burdens on its consciousness in dealing harshly with the poor and deprived if these people are considered inferior and less deserving. There is then a relief of conscience, assuming that the wealthy elite are not also psychopaths, which is the ultimate liberation from human empathy.
As any geologist or evolutionary biologist knows, ‘survival of the fittest’ in Darwinian evolutionary terms really means survival of the most adaptable over time, in terms of being able to adapt in terms of successfully occupying environmental niches.
A mischievious interpretation of immigration as a phenomenon is that migrants are actually the most adaptable people and hence the ‘fittest’, though this inverts the thinking of the populist far right and fascistic position which prefers the ‘lesser human’ and ‘sub-human ‘ view.
As those expert demographers Daryl Hall and John Oates once put it – “the strong give up and move on, while the weak, give up and stay.”
Social Darwinism is the pernicious and toxic lifeblood that governs white Christian nationalism as it does Zionism, oligarchic capitalism, and fascism. It unites them all.
Thank you for making this point. Recall also that Darwin himself was viscerally opposed to the Poor Law (even the very onerous New Poor Law, which operated on the ‘less eligibility’ basis), just has he was opposed to old age pensions or ‘relief’ of almost any kind. And he was followed in this dogma by his own family party (such as Galton) and other eminent eugenicists, such as Pearson or Fisher (this included ‘Christian’ eugenicists like Inge). Darwin argued vehemently that any form of assistance to the poor was inimical to evolutionary dynamics and would corrupt the species. This was in striking contrast to the co-discoverer of evolution, Wallace, who felt that the provision of assistance was entirely appropriate (Wallace was a *far* more sympathetic personality, in my view).
Note the revival of a dogmatic Darwinism by Dawkins and his school. Lately Dawkins has swung to the Far Right (where he was perhaps to be found all along), but has ‘revealed’ himself in that regard. I suspect that many of the Silicon Valley broligarchs were deeply influenced by ‘The Selfish Gene’ and the New Atheism which Dawkins pioneered in the 1990s and early 2000s.
So eugenics is the new buzz word? Or has Medicaid always been a bandaid over an illogical health system that the Dems as well Repubs refuse to fix? If Trump’s rhetoric is off the wall then what about his opponents? All is forgiven as long as you can claim to be the “lesser” evil.
The solution that seems obvious to some of us is to make our medical system less costly rather than less available. But this would break rice bowls out to the horizon including those of many good PMC who claim to only be concerned about the health of the nation. Meanwhile careless slanders of people like RFK serve to point the finger elsewhere. Call it not so much the Nazi eugenicist model as the Israeli model. Just find someone else to blame and all is forgiven.
Undoubtedly RFK jr. has his own problem with belief in CT but I don’t think that makes him a Nazi. It’s just a way of changing the subject.
RFK Jr is a real man with real power in a governing administration of the most powerful and influential country in the world who is espousing rhetoric and enacting policy which, if not (yet!) explicitly Lebensunwertes Leben, can certainly be classified as Lebensunwertes Leben-adjacent, as explained pretty clearly in this article. That’s manifestly worthy of the strongest possible condemnation irrespective of the PMCs under the bed or “but the Dems!!” nihilism.
Lambert Strether referred to it several years ago as Stochastic Eugenics. Was it a buzzword when he invented it? And did he ever call it “nazi”?
I suppose by now that those people who wanted to see Trump win will never face up to the implications of getting what they wanted, and will comfort themselves with cope, both-sides and “but-but-but The Dems!” for the rest of their lives.
Meanwhile the rest of us will move on to a consideration of real causes, real differences between real alternatives, and the fostering of personal survival and even co-social survival if we can figure out how.
Promises made, promises which will NOT be kept. That exponential function thingy from middle school.
The simple answer to why the elite of the world want to kill the rest of us is “resources.”
The planet is in population overshoot. Affordable hydrocarbon energy will be gone by around 2100. Aquifers are being depleted. Mined phosphate for fertilizer is getting scarcer. Ecological collapse is already well underway.
From the point of view of the Uber wealthy, the best outcome is to remove about nine tenths of the human population and replace them with robots. The only question for them is how this is best achieved.
Don’t misunderstand. There’s no shadowy cabal of conspirators. There’s no overt cooperation among the wealthy. This will all happen because of completely independent actions based on common assumptions shared by the ultra wealthy around the world. In practice, it’s more like all the bacteria on a dish heading for the sugar, pushing the weaker bacteria aside to get to it.
So it’s essentially Darwinian dynamics.
If one definition of civilization is the homo species’ attempt to mitigate, if not do away with, the brutality and the methods of the natural world, then the uber wealthy’s response to resource scarcity cannot anywhere be called civilized.
“ Earlier this year, the Ohio House passed a budget proposal: If the federal government ever reduces its contribution to Medicaid, Ohio would immediately revoke health insurance…”
This is what keeps me up at night… Municipal/State governments losing federal dollars
Our family has been a long-time supporter of “death with dignity,” so this provocative article has given me pause, since it lays out the spectre of a eugenical underpinning to the movement that I have never considered (e.g. Canada’s MAID). It troubles me to think that what I have heretofore considered an act of compassion i.e. moving from cure to comfort for the terminally ill, could be used as justification for social/political policies that would increase the number of “deaths of despair.” Living will, medical power of attorney and end of life choice for what types of medical treatment are acceptable for a patient strike me as a form of empowerment by giving agency to individuals seeking to minimize intrusive Medical Industrial Complex efforts to “cure” at all costs. Speaking of costs, end of life care in the last months of life requires economic resources sufficient to handle expenses not covered by federal programs like Medicaid and Medicare. While the expenses are significant, I don’t see making an affirmative choice to end suffering as primarily a financial decision, rather an opportunity to confront Death in a thoughtful and honorable way that brings peace to the patient and their families.
Otto, I’m in much the same situation. Since I was a teenager (I’m now in my mid-50s), I have found it baffling that in the case of certain rapid and painfully terminal diseases, humans won’t get the same consideration as my cats will, with an option to skip the most unpleasant end stages. I’ve supported this all my life — up until last year, when I started to learn about the Canadian situation.
I still believe that it should be permitted—in principle and with considerable care and serious guardrails—for someone with stage four pancreatic cancer, say, to take an early exit if they want and are in a right mind to decide that for themselves. But the simple reality is people are being ushered out the door for entirely economic reasons. I’m no longer sure how medical suicide (or whatever euphemism is popular now) can be safe and just in the current economic environment. It’s an ugly dilemma.
There was a monster of an argument in links about this some days ago.
I think it’s fairly apparent to clear-eyed people that there are circumstances in which no humane intervention can possibly begin to remedy one’s ailments, and in those cases death is both inevitable and, finally, desirable. Unfortunately, the breakdown of the taboo that prevented us from acknowledging that situation has also freed the absolute jackals of linegoupism to further an agenda that amounts to murderous eugenics. It seems to me that taboos such as these, although situationally cruel, are adaptive for a reason – when we permit the reasonable case the door is left open for the vile. I wish there was a way to reconcile this, but I wish for a lot of things which just aren’t so.
Don’t fall prey to disinformation, your original instincts were correct.
This piece mistakenly conflates MAiD with the other topics being described. Consider this – which countries have the lowest life expectancies, the biggest gap in life expectancy between rich and poor, the highest inequality, the most people who can’t afford basic medical care, the highest population of prisoners and so on – these are the places where life is held cheaply and the poor are left to die.
Now look at the places where assisted dying is legal: Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Canada, France (as of yesterday) and in the US, mostly just the West Coast. These are the places in the world that generally have the highest life expectancy, the lowest inequality, the smallest prison populations and so on. What these countries have in common is not a big eugenicist movement, but rather a high commitment to individual liberty – even the liberty for a person to take their own life (in certain circumstances)
If that isn’t enough to convince you, consider that almost all of the Musk and Maga villains in the original post are on the side of the opposition to assisted dying, not in support. Why would that be, if the rationale is the same?
Finally, we can further see that assisted dying laws are rooted in individual liberty concerns rather than in ‘go die neoliberalism’ from the path that MAiD (medical assistance in dying) took in Canada. It wasn’t a scheme from the government to save money** but was instead forced on the government by the courts when the supreme court rule invalidated the law against assisted dying on the basis that it was an infringement of individual rights (as set out in the constitution). The government then passed a law that allowed assisted dying in cases of terminal illness, but this was again struck down by the courts as too restrictive. In response the government passed a new law with two tracks, one for terminal illness and one with additional controls (90 day waiting period, expert testimony, mandatory provision of information on alternatives, etc.) for cases of non-terminal illness.
I am not even saying assisted dying laws can’t go too far or can’t be abused, obviously both are possible and every country/state will have to do its best to find the right balance, but that assessment is a million miles from what you hear from the right-wing disinformation campaign against assisted dying that is echoed in this post.
You can read more here by looking up, “Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada After Carter v. Canada” if you are interested in more than misleading soundbites (omg, Canada is killing the poor!, lol)
I’m thinking that an inflection point was reached in the first year of the pandemic. With lock-downs and social restriction and banning international travel, the media pushed old people onto TV saying that they were fine with being sacrificed in the present pandemic. That was when we used to think that Covid only really effected old and sick people. And there were a lot of people who were saying that this was a good idea. Not sure but I think that people like Dr. Oz were saying the same. There were too many people who resented not being able to go to a restaurant all the time and hated how they had to cancel that overseas trip to the sun. So if to get that back meant having to sacrifice granny and grandpa, lots of people were suddenly fine with that. And the sick? Well that was just the luck of the draw. Ask not what your country can do for you, just go and die. The old have had their time they said. Why should we sacrifice the best part of our social lives on behalf of them. And it was at that point that you had a lot of buy in to the idea of sacrificing people.
Granny and Grandpa should and did self-isolate. As should all at-risk people during the pandemic. We did – and we didn’t get COVID until December 2023 when we had to stay in a hotel. Locking down healthy people to “save Granny and Grandpa” is simply dishonest and wrong-headed and we are living the consequences now – a generation of young people who are social misfits, unhappy, with all kinds of problems caused by forcing them away from healthy socialization. Talk to any teacher about the problems they are having in the classroom. It’s disgenics in action, caused by government overreach and poor policy.
Sorry, this is really wrong-headed. Kids are now reported to be very frequently sick, and that appears to be the result of repeated Covid infections. This is going to have a lifespan cost. More Covid = more T cell depletion, and T-cells are what your body relies on to stop the cancers we grow all time from becoming life-threatening.
And see:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/long-covid-is-harming-too-many-kids/
Second, children were in a mental health crisis before Covid. Look at the rate of medication.
Third, a study looking to find mental health impacts came up empty:
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/mental-health-impact-covid19-children-young-people-neurodevelopmental-conditions
They then handwaved that some kids actually got BETTER while others got worse. Lordie.
There was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s show about 2 months ago, Patrick Soon-Shiong (A billionaire who made his fortune developing cancer treatments, owns the L.A Times) who IIRC claimed that his company, ”Bioshield Therapeutics” developed a T-cell vaccine/therapeutic that eliminates SARS-2 from the body entirely. I am going off of memory so may get some stuff wrong here but Anthony Leonardi was asked about this on a twitter spaces and he said he thought the T-cell vaccine would not have the efficacy Patrick claims due to MHC-1 suppression, but that he would love to be wrong on that. All of this is way above my paygrade, would love to hear the covid brain trust’s thoughts on the matter but not trying to assign homework. Can search, ”tucker carlson patrick soon-shiong” on youtube to find the talk, titled, ”Cancer Rising in Kids”
The United States of course having been an exemplar of healthy socialisation at scale for young and old in the year 2019, when there were simply no political-economically generated impediments to wider social and communal wellbeing, there was no child-on-child violence, and everyone was very socially fulfilled, particularly in the context of the United States’ urban design, which is of course internationally famous for its pro-social tendencies. And we threw it all away in 2020 to (pretend to, due in large part to the political meddling of the simpering morons flanking RFK Jr in the video above) keep people from getting sick for a few months here and there. Oh, the humanity!
I imagine many grandparents did not have the option of isolating.
Covid will disable society given the time and opportunity.
Anecdotally, Covid is popping up again amongst the friends, family and colleague group in the New York metro area.
The mockdowns were to flatten the curve for hospitals, less to “save Granny and Grandpa”. Actual lockdowns would have stopped the spread, but brunch and vacations must happen, and paying people to stay home and keep everyone healthy was a bridge too far.
And citing American schools as places for “healthy socialization”…
Plenty of money and resources to finance genocide, wars, and nuclear weapons “modernization”,
But we’re broke when it comes to health, social services etc. The drama of “default” and “fiscal crisis” in the MiniTrueMedia media helps drive the point.
Since our wonderful technology and AI will render most “useless eater” humans redundant: there is only one optimal market solution:
Soylent Green. It is the answer to all of our problems: it will take care of the surplus population, while creating a new commodity category. Soylent Green can be used for renewable, green energy; and/or a source of protein and nutrition. We can get in on the ground floor of this new investment opportunity and really “make a killing”. The pilot programme is being conducted in Palestine, stay tuned…
(Sorry for the morbid humor, but it might not be too far off the mark)
I love how these golden children think of themselves as Übermensch. Of course you are fit and healthy with that sort of monied support, the British royalty don’t live to be over a hundred because they are genetically superior they live for over a century because they suck the guts out of the commonwealth.
America has an aristocratic class with all the little-boy-idolisation-of-the-school-captain that Lewis spoke of in his pioneering ‘Chivalry’. They are using this ancient method to cement their tier in society.
Recall that much of the Nazi race ideology and eugenics movement originated in the US. Hitler praised ‘The Passing of the Great Race’ as his bible. The Nazis directly borrowed and copied US sterilization laws. The US Immigration act was the direct inspiration for Nazi race ideology and outlined racial hierarchies.
So we shouldn’t be surprised the policies continue to this day in various guises. The elites have learned not to be so overt about it.
There was a very strong eugenics movement in California with individuals who supported Hitler financially.
The Rockefeller Foundation funded German eugenics.
Eugenic sterilisations were a big thing in Califorrnia in the 30s and even continued after WW2.
Eugenic sterilizations were still taking place in California as late as 1970.
Sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the common good…by the poor and the powerless.
It’s God’ Swill.
I think that California was doing sterilizations into the middle of the 1970s, which was quite illegal then, but it still happened. The same was true with the sterilizations in the women’s prisons, which were happening into the 1990s. It has been decades since I did any reading on it with the information rather hard to find.
Like with the inmate gladiator fights that the prison guards used to arrange for and bet on, it took years for enough victims to sue or researchers to do studies for the news media (back when there was one) to do stories. After all it was only the most vulnerable, easy to discredit, people who were complaining.
With the destruction of the media, how easy would it be to hide such things now?
As to MAiD, I do wonder what Tommy Douglas, Al Johnson, Woodrow Lloyd, Allan MacEachen and the other founders of Canadian Medicare would think of it. Especially Douglas, the Baptist minister, whose faith animated practically the entirety of his thinking. Would Douglas not have regarded it as an utterly malignant abomination?
Given that the savings from the 2016 legislation are so paltry, surely the death lobby will soon be pushing for a relaxation of the rules in order to improve their profit margins?
Just because evil people misuse good policies does not make good policies bad. Death with dignity in its various forms is a tool of mercy for people with terminal illness. The fact that some people are being driven towards it by malevolent forces does not make it bad. It probably does not even increase death rates. The destruction of the safety net is what is causing the excess deaths. In the United States we are approaching one million homeless people. Our response is to destroy their camps and trash their belongings. They have high mortality rates. Forcing a few people to be homeless instead of allowing them death with dignity is just piling more cruelty on top of cruelty. Oregon, where I live, has had assisted suicide laws for years, and it is a mercy.
What we are going to have to fight against eventually will be State mandated “mercy killings.”
As many above recognize, join eugenics to “assisted suicide” and we become the prey of our “betters.”
With a subject as final as death, strong impediments to the enablement of an easy quietus are necessary. It is a decision that is not reversible.
Fair point, Craig. I mentioned in the piece but perhaps could have made more clear that the issue isn’t assisted suicide in such cases of terminal illness, but that “the Canadian government will provide suffering people with disabilities access to death, without making sure they have the support they need to live.”
Dying with dognity in principle is fine.
However policies and principles don’t happen in isolation. Them happen in specific political, economic and social circumstances.
It used to be common to expose new born babies with disabilties so that they would not be a burden. Because the economics of those socities could not cope with it. Our socities had moved beyond that. Devloped the spare capacity to take care of people who needed. Even on occasion to help them thrive within society. Think of the contributions of Stephen Hawkings. A strict Social Darwinism would have let him expire. But thankfully not.
But a move towards assisted dying is happening at a time where the political culture at the elite end is very much driven by a belief in useless mouths. As such any asisted dying laws will reflect that or be corrupted towards that aim.
@Craig Dempsey at 2:18 pm
Totally agree with you. Dying with dignity should be a right. In Canada MAID began when a seriously disabled woman (Sue Rodriguez) objected in the early 1990s to the State denying her the right to die with dignity. I still recall when prominent Quebec singer Pauline Julien whom I met socially once through a friend was forced to die alone, overdosing on pills at the age of 75, after suffering a permanently disabling disease. So sad. She could have been surrounded by family and friends. I support MAID in Canada. There are a variety of safeguards BUT it is true that palliative care is inadequate so that is a serious problem. But THAT is the problem. To portray what we have in Canada as a move by neoliberals to exterminate the poor and disabled is not a serious position.
Neoliberals here have a lot of nasty things to answer for here but that is not one of them.
Regarding the lack of palliative care and MAID in Canada: https://ww.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15265161.2025.2488260
A good policy at a bad time will be a bad policy. Reminds me of what I heard somebody say once about motherhood (& democracy!) — something like, it is beautiful and right in some circumstances but not all.
Capitalist governments lean in to help you die while withdrawing help to live. This stinks. It must be resisted. Very many people live in pain because of capitalist crimes. Outlaw profiteering and watch chronic disease decline. Support assisted dying if it strikes you as morally proper — but only within a revolutionary context of broad dismantling of capitalist social relations. Right now we must presume the vulnerable are being deliberate immiserated and exterminated.
Is death with dignity better than living homeless? I don’t think so, but my outlook on this is spiritual and influenced by the teachings of Buddhism and other Eastern traditions. At a systemic level we must commit every resource to the uplift of others. On a personal level the challenge is to accept impermanence with equanimity. As the I Ching advises, all abundance precedes loss.
Ironically, underneath all of this I find a challenge to overcome fear of death (literal death but also social death and degraded circumstances). From such a place a person is less easily exploited and coerced. But overcoming one’s fear of death is not the same as embracing death.
Most of the moment’s social ills could be solved with a two week general strike by the entire working class. For that to become likely, more people need to find how to accept (what might initially look like) a decline in circumstances, and certainly the threat of death.
Straight from the horse’s a$$:
“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit—they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” – Elon Musk
True, but if you have Musk saying it, you know it’s morally wrong.
It’s almost as if they have never met anyone from other cultures. Funnily enough, people all over the world have the ability to be empathic to one another.
Elon Musk was born and raised surrounded by peopie from other cultures, separated by an apartheid wall.
He was. And who was it in that situation who showed little empathy?
I am 71 years old with multiple serious health issues and chronic severe pain for the last 35 years.
When my cancer returns (Stage 4 Lymphoplasmocytic lymphoma) I will very seriously consider assisted suicide.
Death with dignity is not a small blessing.
The sun is shining, pretty women are walking past where I sit and the magnolias are in bloom, I am grateful for today and when it is time for me to go it will be with a thankful heart.
Worthwhile article but feels like a truly strong through-line is missing, leaving a gentle feeling of begging the question. Why are they trying to kill us? As a suppression/subjugation strategy in the face of a declining rate of profit. Neoliberalism is a distracting label in this context; modern capitalists are following the same lines of thought as the German and Italian capitalists of a century ago and coming to similiar conclusions. The circumstances are slightly different, requiring a softly-softly approach in some regions of the world… but looking at Gaza, it seems that most of the same options are still on the table.
Does the capitalist know that the Enterprise brings about mass death? Yes, this has always been clear since the era’s “rosy dawn”. This isn’t a new tendency. Apparently novel permutations like assisted dying for the homeless and anxious, shouldn’t be mystified — it is the old bloodlust in changed circumstances; callous disregard for the death of the vulnerable isn’t eugenics, it is callous disregard for the death of the vulnerable. Here the disabled, there the stressed, over there the indigineous. Yesterday, on balance, it was considered best not to kill, or leave to die, this or that group. But today it makes dollar-sense. You must be able to kill. It is capitalism.
> But let’s not forget that the Biden administration was in some cases outdoing the current one
#ExactlyThis
This is why I jokingly commented on the “Trump’s Liquidation of U.S Global Leadership” post that Biden was being unfairly treated for having all the chaos and malevolence ascribed to Trump alone.
I have always been of the belief that once US Administration socioeconomic violence found fewer avenues abroad to manifest, that it would ultimately turn inward to a greater degree. African Americans and the poor already knew, but now greater swaths of the US population are set to becomes victims of macroeconomic malfeasance.
This sets the stage for pitchforks aimed squarely at this country’s rancid pluto-kleptocracy (and hopefully not at each other)