The Eugenics of Capitalism
Dispersed concentration camps and the elimination of the other
Theories of inherited traits laid the groundwork for Eugenics, but the term ‘gene’, used to indicate a hereditary unit, wasn’t used until 1909. So, the word eugenics wasn’t derived from genes. In fact, it’s derived from ‘eu’ meaning happiness (as in euphoria), and genesis (as in creation). Ironically, it literally means ‘creating happiness’. The word was first coined in 1883, when Sir Francis Galton thought improving the human race could be achieved through planned reproduction. Galton had no desire for his theory to be used as justification for genocide, preferring ‘positive eugenics’—the use of financial incentives to encourage the ‘fittest’ to breed, selectively.
While eugenics has been used as justification for some very nasty stuff, it’s wrong to think of it as a misguided political ideology. Nature has always been doing eugenics. Once, I saw a defeathered, bleeding magpie try to escape the brutality of nature by hopping into my kitchen. Its siblings had ganged up on it, viciously tearing feathers from its skinny wings until it was no longer able to fly. Normally wary of humans, this little bundle of pain took a chance most birds would avoid. I found it cowering in a corner under a stool. We looked at each other for a while, neither knowing what to do. I moved first and fetched a cardboard box to put it in. My intention was to try to nurse it to better health and send it back out to fight. Then, I wondered if it would be better if I wrung its neck. Either my thoughts, or my movements, startled it, and it hurried back out into nature’s nightmare. The next morning, a pile of feathers on the lawn confirmed the outcome. This little one has been deselected from the gene pool.
Human society is no different. No surprise, we’re the products of nature too. What’s different is that we recognize what’s going on, and we know it isn’t rational or moral. Well, some of us do. Others think that ‘it’s natural’ justifies anything they like, and vilifies the rest. It’s a reiteration of, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’ from Alistair Crowley’s ‘spiritual’ work; a central tenet of Thelema. Such a doctrine doesn’t require evil outcomes, but it doesn’t preclude them either. Perhaps the idea is to gain better awareness of the self, escaping the will of the crowd, and the influence of others. In fact, it’s a nothing doctrine, reiterating Schopenhauer’s observation that the world works according to will. That’s what drives us to activity. And we don’t will the will. It isn’t intelligent, moral, rational, or even self-aware; much like the ‘invisible hand’ of capitalism.
Capitalist eugenics is done on the sly. Its means of exterminating the ‘other’ is to leave them out on the street in the cold winter, to deprive them of income so they cannot look after themselves or their children properly, to bully, coerce, stress, and poison. To drive to breaking, to suicide. Many of these traumatic experiences are passed on, so the next generation of the ‘unfit’ are weaker, and more easily used, consumed, and spat out.
In the USA, one person commits suicide every 11 minutes; over 49 000 per year. 1.5 million attempt suicide. 3.7 million make plans for suicide. 12.8 million have given it serious thought.
That’s almost 4% of the population who become so utterly miserable they cannot bear to be alive any more. If a society violently beat, slashed, and poisoned 1.5 million people, and slaughtered 49 000 per year for not fitting in with its doctrines, what would the West say about it?
The trick capitalism deploys, is to frame the problem as an individual issue. Yet, it’s actually eugenics in action. You see, the framework of capitalist economics favours, and rewards, specific behaviours, just as Galton would have desired. Traits such as power-seeking, dominance, greed, self-promotion, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and even psychopathy, assist in achieving success under capitalism. They have a genetic and biological underpinning. By contrast, prosocial traits, many of which evolved to handle life in small communities of hunter-gatherers, are devalued. Empathy, sensitivity, honesty, compassion, and a conservative attitude to consuming natural resources are also underpinned by genetics and biology, but they’re the sort of things that get you nowhere fast in a competition based hierarchy.
There’s no escape. Should those who want to live under entirely different conditions find themselves a nice little Island somewhere (if only), and keep themselves to themselves, they’ll eventually find the capitalists rock up on shore to bluff, cheat, steal, and murder their way into taking all the stuff, or at least demanding protection money from them. A squawking conglomeration of thugs at the bird table. Empire and colonial conquest show how this operates. They may not be considered capitalist in the modern sense, but that’s just what they were. In fact, the ideology probably evolved from those odd little tribes of cannibalistic headhunters, because that’s all capitalism is. A means for self-engorgement by accumulating heads; caput meaning head in Latin, and head of cattle being a means of counting wealth for bartering or exchange.
Capitalism isn’t alone. All political ideologies are inherently eugenic. They seek to impose a set of guard rails for maximizing the performance of the population by inhibiting certain activities, and encouraging others. It will always be the case that the arbitrary performative goals chosen favour some over others, hence eliminating some genes and preferring those that succeed. But the real damage is done at scale. Large hierarchical systems favour the same traits as capitalism, intended or not. Nazism, fascism, communism, religious fundamentalism, and militant socialism alike. All seek control over what can be said, thought, and done. Those who can lie, cheat, and bully their way to the top, invariably succeed, whether it be the state, a corporation, or a religious cult. At an extreme, this leads to violent outcomes: secret police, political prisons, ghettos, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and death camps; some death camps are concentrated, others are dispersed throughout society.
There’s no answer to this because it’s how nature works, and nature works through us. There’s only one goal in nature, and that’s for sets of gene-based beings to expand and compete with each other. ‘Nature’ is just another way of saying ‘the will’, or ‘the invisible hand’; a better metaphor would be ‘the headless chicken’. It seems odd that some of us carry genes that permit us to understand the nihilism of the process. We seek something more peaceful: an unnatural way of being. Regardless, nature eventually drives us on with her truncheons: hunger, disaster, disease, invasion, or just dopamine-induced curiosity. We lose, or we win and then lose; death comes to all individuals, and extinction to all species. She who must be obeyed is the green goddess, the queen of fertility, the monarch of eugenics, the master archon of the will, and she is utterly senseless.
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