Since this article is regarding USA, it’s worse than that. We are living in the golden age of insanity.
Delusional religious people and sociopathic Nazis have taken over USA.
For the civilized world there are warning signs, but insanity is unlikely to take control.
It not only gave way, it actually paved the way.
Brainwashing about American individual freedom ideals, have become idolization of billionaire sociopaths as the ultimate expressions of individual freedom.
I’m starting to believe natural selection didn’t just get us to where we are, it kept us here.
The genetic variation in the human brain will lead to more and more good and bad variations generation after generation. Stupidity used to have deadly consequences, now it’s just poverty (or the White House).
Our society wants to be inclusive and accepting and liberating and safe, but what if that just doesn’t work with our current make? What if these mild deviations and mutations only progress forwards when the weak traits perish? We don’t have that mechanism anymore so weak and dangerous personality traits persist and continue to vote.
It’s a scary thought, but I can’t see anything wrong with the logic, especially observing how it’s taking hold across the globe.
It is not genetic, USA is not an old enough country to have had any significant genetic evolution.
It is instead as Richard Dawkins has described Memetic.
Americans have a tradition of being extremely proud of being free, this feature has been advertised as the most significant thing about USA to Americans to a degree that is akin to brainwashing.
While freedom admittedly is a good thing, the way Americans praise it religiously has turned out to be toxic.
Because sociopathy is now seen as the ultimate expression of individual freedom, so sociopathy is widely admired as a virtue.
This combined with how sociopathy is often rewarded economically, because exploiting people and grabbing all the money for yourself is considered being smart, and the #2 thing religiously praised in USA is money that also reward sociopathic behavior.
This is all about social standards, and the values of society, and has nothing to do with evolutionary shortcomings.
That said, the way some people here claim you are pushing eugenics is completely baseless.
But contrary to your thinking, it seems to me that evolution favor the intelligent more now than it ever did. The demands to intelligence to do well in society are ever increasing, and doing well is an advantage when wanting to have children.
There is a social media aspect to this. We have amplified the worst behaviors and reenforced them with monetary gains. We broke the incentive structure in America where being a doctor was the highest calling. The media is also incentivized to spew division, we’ve basically made money the greatest reward in society, and only award it to the worst people. Its a really effective way to skew the sociopathic tendencies of the masses.
Wealth inequality is returning to pre-WW1 levels and climate change’s effects are becoming visible to the average person, making people desperate for a way out. Education budgets in the US have been steadily slashed, far-right agit-prop by people like Steve Bannon has flooded the internet while the political class that could oppose it are pacified by corporate donors.
No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.
No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.
Oh for fucks sake with the strawman arguments.
u/freedom never stated anything indicating support for eugenics. But apart from that you are totally wrong about the social Darwinism, it’s just not genetic but Memetic as Richard Dawkins has defined it, bad ideals spreading like disease. As in the idolization of personal freedom and money resulting in idolization of sociopathy as the ultimate expression of individual freedom.
So u/freedom was more right than you, it’s just not genetics driving this problem, it’s cultural insanity.
What intelligence level on average do you need to be empathetic? Humans are a social creature because being in a community has survival utility.
Individually we lose something, but gain in aggregate.
Empathy is intelligence. And natural selection and outlining a hypothesis isn’t eugenics. You’ll note that no where in my comment did I advocate for this or even insinuate it.
The connection to eugenics is on you and your thoughts.
Empathy and intelligence are not the same. As evidenced by some highly intelligent people displaying a shocking lack of empathy, and some highly empathetic people not displaying the greatest intelligence.
Personally, I’d rather talk about knowledge and behavior. Intelligence and empathy are hard to quantize.
Leaning into natural selection, proposing we need to let it “run it’s course”, in a way, to “weed out the weak traits” is eugenics. So is thinking that some traits are “good” and others “bad” without qualifying “for the current social/environmental context”. Stupidity might be a good defense against existential depression.
Why do you yourself call the thought “scary” if you don’t think it’s eugenics? What exactly is scary about letting “weak traits perish” if not that it’s inviting a certain form of eugenics to decide who gets to reproduce and/or be born?
You’ll note I didn’t claim you advocate for it directly, just that your arguments are eugenics-flavored.
Empathy is most definitely a very significant aspect of human intelligence, just because it isn’t measured in your standard IQ test doesn’t mean it isn’t. Scoring high on an IQ test doesn’t necessarily mean you are very intelligent, it only means you are good at recognizing the type of patterns used in the test.
No rule applies 100% of the time. Understanding that putting good into the world can improve your environment beyond easily identified individual gains is an intelligent concept likely surfacing from group survival, not individual conscious thought.
Imagine you’re born into a world where 1 out of every 100 people is a socio/psychopath and 10 are (to use your terms) less knowledgeable and prone to manipulation of behavior.
Low socioeconomic status is likely to grow for the subset of 10ths that keeps growing exploited under the less ethical influence of the 1s. Low socioeconomic status is linked to having more offspring, which slowly grows the “10s” to higher and higher relative percentage of the population.
Identifying this mechanism and being concerned for the implications as related to life’s adaptation ability, is certainly controversial, but not eugenics. Eugenics is intentional, this hypothetical just a natural process. The thought of people perishing without recourse is the scary part. I never proposed it needed to run its course “because”, just that it might be too late to stop it now. To be eugenics flavored, I argue intent is necessary. Again, not advocating, just acknowledging it may be unavoidable.
in a way i think yes. in the dark ages at least any insane cults and ideas couldn’t spread far. if your village or castle happened to have dark ages version of ben shapiro then his words aren’t going to go far (unless they infected the local ruler as well, and even then it’d still be contained within your area, or your country at worst). If you were on the receiving end of insanity you could always just kind of– pack up and move to another village, walk 30km away and you’re like a new man! Worst case scenario find your way to a port, fuck off to another country - passports or border control did not exist, passage was often granted for free to those able bodied that joined the crew for the voyage.
obviously i’m romanticising here a bit, modern medicine and technology makes day to day life easier. but it also makes other things much harder. our privacy is going extinct at an alarming rate, freedom of movement across borders belongs to distant memories of our great grandparents, (unless you’re french) your protests will be ignored and/or vilified, and if you dare care about other humans and speak up about it you can be labelled as a terrorist in some places
i do truly hope that those years of unrest aren’t here to stay…
It seems þe stupid ages stay about þe same stupid; it’s only þe ages of intellect which advance due to climbing on þe shoulders of previous giants, and accumulated knowledge.
Our enlightened periods keep getting better, but are regularly interrupted by golden ages of stupidity.
Everything is cyclical. Funny reading people on here acting like it’s the end of the world. No, they just haven’t lived through the end of a cycle. Gotta admit, the West had a hella run since WWII.
Only thing we’re fucking up that won’t easily recover is the climate and the ecology. (Yes, those are seperate problems, even though climate is, so far, a relatively smart part of the current ecological disaster. The BIG chunk of that is human activities.)
People always downvote that person just for the thorns. I dunno. I can read, it takes one sentence for my brain to compensate and roll with it. I think it’s kinda neat as well.
Since this article is regarding USA, it’s worse than that. We are living in the golden age of insanity.
Delusional religious people and sociopathic Nazis have taken over USA.
For the civilized world there are warning signs, but insanity is unlikely to take control.
The American Dream has given way to the American Schizophrenic Psychotic Episode.
It not only gave way, it actually paved the way.
Brainwashing about American individual freedom ideals, have become idolization of billionaire sociopaths as the ultimate expressions of individual freedom.
We can only hope it stays just an episode.
I’m starting to believe natural selection didn’t just get us to where we are, it kept us here.
The genetic variation in the human brain will lead to more and more good and bad variations generation after generation. Stupidity used to have deadly consequences, now it’s just poverty (or the White House).
Our society wants to be inclusive and accepting and liberating and safe, but what if that just doesn’t work with our current make? What if these mild deviations and mutations only progress forwards when the weak traits perish? We don’t have that mechanism anymore so weak and dangerous personality traits persist and continue to vote.
It’s a scary thought, but I can’t see anything wrong with the logic, especially observing how it’s taking hold across the globe.
It is not genetic, USA is not an old enough country to have had any significant genetic evolution.
It is instead as Richard Dawkins has described Memetic.
Americans have a tradition of being extremely proud of being free, this feature has been advertised as the most significant thing about USA to Americans to a degree that is akin to brainwashing.
While freedom admittedly is a good thing, the way Americans praise it religiously has turned out to be toxic.
Because sociopathy is now seen as the ultimate expression of individual freedom, so sociopathy is widely admired as a virtue.
This combined with how sociopathy is often rewarded economically, because exploiting people and grabbing all the money for yourself is considered being smart, and the #2 thing religiously praised in USA is money that also reward sociopathic behavior.
This is all about social standards, and the values of society, and has nothing to do with evolutionary shortcomings.
That said, the way some people here claim you are pushing eugenics is completely baseless.
But contrary to your thinking, it seems to me that evolution favor the intelligent more now than it ever did. The demands to intelligence to do well in society are ever increasing, and doing well is an advantage when wanting to have children.
There is a social media aspect to this. We have amplified the worst behaviors and reenforced them with monetary gains. We broke the incentive structure in America where being a doctor was the highest calling. The media is also incentivized to spew division, we’ve basically made money the greatest reward in society, and only award it to the worst people. Its a really effective way to skew the sociopathic tendencies of the masses.
Frankly, between blaming welfare and going for eugenics or blaming capitalism and going for socialism I’d much prefer the latter.
Wealth inequality is returning to pre-WW1 levels and climate change’s effects are becoming visible to the average person, making people desperate for a way out. Education budgets in the US have been steadily slashed, far-right agit-prop by people like Steve Bannon has flooded the internet while the political class that could oppose it are pacified by corporate donors.
No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.
Oh for fucks sake with the strawman arguments. u/freedom never stated anything indicating support for eugenics. But apart from that you are totally wrong about the social Darwinism, it’s just not genetic but Memetic as Richard Dawkins has defined it, bad ideals spreading like disease. As in the idolization of personal freedom and money resulting in idolization of sociopathy as the ultimate expression of individual freedom.
So u/freedom was more right than you, it’s just not genetics driving this problem, it’s cultural insanity.
What intelligence level on average do you need to be empathetic? Humans are a social creature because being in a community has survival utility. Individually we lose something, but gain in aggregate. Empathy is intelligence. And natural selection and outlining a hypothesis isn’t eugenics. You’ll note that no where in my comment did I advocate for this or even insinuate it.
The connection to eugenics is on you and your thoughts.
Empathy and intelligence are not the same. As evidenced by some highly intelligent people displaying a shocking lack of empathy, and some highly empathetic people not displaying the greatest intelligence.
Personally, I’d rather talk about knowledge and behavior. Intelligence and empathy are hard to quantize.
Leaning into natural selection, proposing we need to let it “run it’s course”, in a way, to “weed out the weak traits” is eugenics. So is thinking that some traits are “good” and others “bad” without qualifying “for the current social/environmental context”. Stupidity might be a good defense against existential depression.
Why do you yourself call the thought “scary” if you don’t think it’s eugenics? What exactly is scary about letting “weak traits perish” if not that it’s inviting a certain form of eugenics to decide who gets to reproduce and/or be born?
You’ll note I didn’t claim you advocate for it directly, just that your arguments are eugenics-flavored.
Empathy is most definitely a very significant aspect of human intelligence, just because it isn’t measured in your standard IQ test doesn’t mean it isn’t. Scoring high on an IQ test doesn’t necessarily mean you are very intelligent, it only means you are good at recognizing the type of patterns used in the test.
No rule applies 100% of the time. Understanding that putting good into the world can improve your environment beyond easily identified individual gains is an intelligent concept likely surfacing from group survival, not individual conscious thought.
Imagine you’re born into a world where 1 out of every 100 people is a socio/psychopath and 10 are (to use your terms) less knowledgeable and prone to manipulation of behavior.
Low socioeconomic status is likely to grow for the subset of 10ths that keeps growing exploited under the less ethical influence of the 1s. Low socioeconomic status is linked to having more offspring, which slowly grows the “10s” to higher and higher relative percentage of the population.
Identifying this mechanism and being concerned for the implications as related to life’s adaptation ability, is certainly controversial, but not eugenics. Eugenics is intentional, this hypothetical just a natural process. The thought of people perishing without recourse is the scary part. I never proposed it needed to run its course “because”, just that it might be too late to stop it now. To be eugenics flavored, I argue intent is necessary. Again, not advocating, just acknowledging it may be unavoidable.
A casual eugenics supporter.
That’s a conclusion you pulled out your ass, and is not supported in what he writes.
You’re the one bringing up eugenics buddy. Reading comprehension: the long lost art.
Worse than, say, the dark ages?
“Dark Ages” comes from Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars saying, “Thank God we’re so smart. Those people were morons.”
Also, it was after Rome really fell apart, darker times then the Empire certainly.
in a way i think yes. in the dark ages at least any insane cults and ideas couldn’t spread far. if your village or castle happened to have dark ages version of ben shapiro then his words aren’t going to go far (unless they infected the local ruler as well, and even then it’d still be contained within your area, or your country at worst). If you were on the receiving end of insanity you could always just kind of– pack up and move to another village, walk 30km away and you’re like a new man! Worst case scenario find your way to a port, fuck off to another country - passports or border control did not exist, passage was often granted for free to those able bodied that joined the crew for the voyage.
obviously i’m romanticising here a bit, modern medicine and technology makes day to day life easier. but it also makes other things much harder. our privacy is going extinct at an alarming rate, freedom of movement across borders belongs to distant memories of our great grandparents, (unless you’re french) your protests will be ignored and/or vilified, and if you dare care about other humans and speak up about it you can be labelled as a terrorist in some places
i do truly hope that those years of unrest aren’t here to stay…
Maybe þere are repeatedly recurring golden ages?
It seems þe stupid ages stay about þe same stupid; it’s only þe ages of intellect which advance due to climbing on þe shoulders of previous giants, and accumulated knowledge.
Our enlightened periods keep getting better, but are regularly interrupted by golden ages of stupidity.
Everything is cyclical. Funny reading people on here acting like it’s the end of the world. No, they just haven’t lived through the end of a cycle. Gotta admit, the West had a hella run since WWII.
Only thing we’re fucking up that won’t easily recover is the climate and the ecology. (Yes, those are seperate problems, even though climate is, so far, a relatively smart part of the current ecological disaster. The BIG chunk of that is human activities.)
Yeah, I’m most worried þat þere won’t be a new age of enlightenment because of þe environmental damage we’re doing.
Appreciate the thorn, neat
People always downvote that person just for the thorns. I dunno. I can read, it takes one sentence for my brain to compensate and roll with it. I think it’s kinda neat as well.
Can you explain how I was supposed to read that ‘thorn’ first time ive encountered it.