a turkey votes for Christmas

https://odysee.com/@millennialwoes:4/MY2023CollectiveDismal:4

a weird millenniyule interview with some guy who is promoting eugenics -  ie, a turkey voting for Christmas.

He says,  ‘population control and the elimination of the underclasses is something anybody [in power] is going to have to deal with’  - yeh, and as we know by now, they do indeed deal with it,  but I don’t think the kind of livestock that they’re trying to breed, or the traits that they’re trying to breed out,  are quite the same as the ones that would be chosen by this speaker  - in fact, they’re probably almost the exact opposite of his particular preferences.  

He has taken very much to heart the Malthusian idea of the finite resources of the earth,  and the inevitability of unchecked population growth reaching some bottleneck,  which will unleash the four horsemen of the apocalypse, or at least the black one,representing famine:  ‘unless you flat-out deny scarcity…you’re going to have to be faced with that at a certain point’  - from which point of view, eugenics is presented as mere humanitarian relief. Deploring the exponential nature of population growth,  he says ,  ‘at some point, you reach carrying capacity’

Malthusianism is perhaps the respectable face of eugenics,  it’s what eugenicists of all stripes will all say,  but personally I doubt it’s anything more than a kind of post-hoc rationalisation – is there even any evidence that it’s true? 

He has a conception of humanity ‘emerging from a state of nature’  which was somehow violent and anarchic,  and then ‘stabilising under the rule of law’ -  how does he know any of this?  I don’t think we know anything about history,  or where we came from,  any strands of truth we may have are deeply obfuscated by the many lies that have been told.  I suspect his idea is not really based on any actual historical research or insight, but is rather a psychologically gratifying tableau his imagination has weaved for itself,  in which he expresses his deep craving for order and certainty, and his horror of its opposite – chaos and unpredictability.

He talks somewhat opaquely about male/female demographics,  relating it to sexual politics, and he relates the ‘diminishing male role’ to this alleged emergence from the state of nature – which he seems to think is the price paid by men for civilisation: as their traditional role as protectors and providers was taken by the state.

He comes across as quite rambling and opaque generally;  as if he has a number of different motifs going on in his head, which by turn bob up and down periodically on the surface of his discourse. So at one point he’s talking about the Great Men Who Built Civilisation (eg, Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton) saying we can not conflate these titans with the average male, and here Woes valiantly tries to ground him a bit,  nudging him gently toward the issue of the steady economic displacement of workers of all stripes through the advance of technology,  and the speaker responds to this with ‘we have to move beyond humanism’ -  and   launches into a panegyric of the eugenicists of the late nineteenth century, [he later refers to Francis Galton as ‘arguably the smartest man who ever lived’]  as if he thinks we have foolishly rejected what they got so right on some kind of foolish sentimental grounds:  ‘are we to believe that they were wrong on this one point? ‘   He says of WWII:   ‘they lost the war,  but they didn’t lose the argument’  - Woes may just be trying to draw him out, leaving whatever his own views might be on the back burner,  but he seems not entirely unsympathetic to this point of view.   The speaker then notes that there were parties who profited ‘from proliferating bad genes’ 

Then we get on to what is probably closer to the cause of his ennui, as he notes with disgust that ‘people with bad genes have more fecundity,  they breed at a much faster rate’  - - so he doesn’t like all those plebs,  those low-lifes, those untermenschen,  and he designates them with the term  ‘bad genes’  because this just sounds  more scientific and rational than the words I just used,  more impersonal and distant from his own emotions and personal preferences.      He draws the strange analogy [he has quite a few of these] of fish breeding more prolifically than whales:  his idea being I think that in nature lower quality beings tend to outnumber higher quality ones. (I mean, is he claiming that if we culled some of the fishes, we would get more whales?  Don’t the whales eat the fishes?)     He says,  ‘if you don’t check the breeding of the lower classes, they will pull down the mean’  -  by which he seems to mean that he doesn’t want to live in a society where the stupid plebs outnumber the cultured middle classes.  He says it’s as if the stupid plebs block the ascent of the sacred Cultured Ones up some ladder:  threatening them that if they don’t carry them up the ladder on their back, they will kick the ladder out from under them.  And even if you agree to carry them,  this can only work short-term,  because you will  eventually be crushed by the sheer numbers.

I guess I can concede he has a point in so far as a productive, responsible class indeed has something to fear from an unproductive irresponsible one – especially as the latter are likely to be as irresponsible in their breeding habits as they are in everything else.  Even leaving aside the issue of a welfare state,  the feckless ones are unlikely to leave the productive ones in peace – rather than quietly drop dead in a ditch, they are more likely to turn to crime and robbery in order to survive.  And even if they didn’t, or if you somehow had satisfactory security systems in place to protect yourself,  why would you want your view to be marred by the sight of brutes living in squalor, abusing and killing one another, disease-ridden and filthy?  Are these the kind of neighbours you would want on your lovely planet?

He tells an anecdote about the horror he felt on catching sight one day in the street of a disabled [midget] white woman who had bred with a black man to produce a half-caste and similarly disabled child.   At which point you just want to tell him to grow a pair, or get help – it reminded me of one my own anecdotes, (my ‘little Lord Fauntleroy’ anecdote, I call it) when several decades ago I helped out a neighbour of mine in an emergency, by taking her cossetted only child to his private day school.   As I don’t drive, and don’t have a car, that meant taking him on the bus, which was a new experience for him.  There was an incident which I barely registered and immediately forgot where an old tramp got on the bus, refused to pay, and there was a mild altercation with the driver, until another passenger, to stop the bus being late, bought the man a ticket.   The tramp sat down, and for the remainder of the journey muttered to himself while emitting a powerful stench of unwashed and probably diseased body.   Later in the day the neighbour rang me – she had been summonsed to collect her child from school,  he had been shaking, vomiting, crying, could not speak about the terrible trauma he had suffered, until by degrees they coaxed out of him the story of the old tramp. 

The speaker said it was wrong that his taxes should be applied to support this family and families like it,  which I 100% agree with by the way, (in that I don’t think anybody should be paying any taxes at all, to any so-called ‘government’, for anything)  but like the Malthusianism,  I don’t think that’s really what’s bugging him, it’s at most a secondary issue for him;   he is rather aghast that no restrictions are placed on breeding:   ‘anybody with a fertile womb can do it, that’s enough;  you can’t go fishing without a licence,  you can’t drive, but when it comes to reproduction, the most important part of a nation’s capital, it’s just anarchic’  

Woes again brilliantly tries to rein this lunatic in to some kind of normalcy – [the anecdote aroused a somewhat different kind of fastidiousness in him than in his guest,  he commented queasily,  ‘I guess in her circumstances,  the black man was the best mate she thought she could get’] and he brought up those kinds of cases where it might be harder to see it as axiomatically inhumane or morally repugnant to consider forced sterilisation:  as in the sad case of a mentally subnormal woman who was repeatedly getting pregnant by different men, and who burdened the welfare state considerably with the raising of her damaged children, that she was in no fit condition to manage independently.  The speaker then refers to severely disabled people with nobody to love or care for them,  living in institutions with no quality of life at all, ‘the guy who just sits and rocks back and forth all day’ (sounds like my life)  - he clearly thinks these people should simply be destroyed, like vermin.  I suspect a lot of people agree with him on that, whether or not they care to openly admit it,  and even if you disagree, as I do,  you still can’t help but get where he is coming from - it’s a stance which naturally follows on from the totally skewed view of life and reality that we have: our understanding of why we are here, and what it's really about.   Another of his analogies: we are in a kind of ‘Titanic’ situation, sitting in lifeboats pulling the drowning bodies out of the water,  and he says that those who blindly keep doing it, with no regard for the carrying capacity of the lifeboat, are the people ‘who hate life’ while on the other hand, those who truly love life will be prepared to sever the hands of those trying to climb in.  

Woes diplomatically steers him away from the topic of blacks over-breeding, or inter-breeding with whites, and shares some stories of his own about feckless breeders, contrasting them with the cultured and responsible people who either don’t breed at all, or do so below the replacement rate.   The speaker replies that he is not about forcing people to breed, like racehorses,  only about preventing the unfit ones – he calls it ‘negative eugenics’  - he denies he is trying to ‘induce a certain type of outcome’ – his aim would be to remove the pernicious influences. ‘you give as much room to human freedom in this process as possible, but there are limits’

At one point Woes asks him what he thinks society is for.  (what do you mean by ‘society’;  what do you mean by ‘for’)   - it seems he is asking about what kind of guiding principles should be adopted (I use the passive deliberately, since it’s not clear whose guiding principles he means-  we, the plebs?  The ruling class?  Or some impersonal force – ‘society’) – he suggests the principle we currently have guiding us is ‘efficiency’  (has he been reading Jacques Ellul?) – Woes concedes to his guest that he would indeed like to see the kind of people he approves of breeding more than they do, and those he does not approve of breeding less,  but he objects to the kind of program that the speaker has in mind on the ground that its implementation  would require ‘a deeply authoritarian government’  (you don’t say!)  In Woes’ view the guiding principle of ‘society’  should be ‘to enable people to live good lives’  Speaker’s reply:  ‘negative eugenics aims to remove inhibitions to the creative processes of man’ adding that the things he values are innovation,  proliferation of ideas, art, poetry, and to enable all this to flourish,  you have to deal with ‘parasites’ and ‘rent-seekers’ who stand in the way of these things - he seems to think that the ‘evolutionarily unfit’ by which he means those who don’t have the wherewithal to survive and make it on their own,  will ‘scorch the earth’ for the others, out of some kind of spite.

He says ‘the barrier for entry in a 21^st C society – the bar is raised pretty high’  ‘you have to be tech-savvy, you have to be literate’ (really? These are the entry qualifications for surviving and having children?  a world of silicon valley types?) he says again that it is not his aim to force any outcome, nazi eugenics for example is ‘overly-inductive’ and ‘too romantic’ (he thinks many of Woes’ audience won’t like to hear this)

Woes asks him if he’s romantic himself,  and in spite of having just used it himself in the sense Woes meant it (with regard to the nazis) he seems to understand the word in Woes’ question as ‘sentimental’ (you see how his mind is all over the place?) because he goes off again on the ‘cruel to be kind’ lane (people don’t deserve to live solely on the grounds that they’re human)  He says ‘it’s not about how many smart or beautiful people you have,  it’s about how many dumb people you don’t have’  ‘anyone is fit to breed as long as they’re not unfit to breed’ 

At this point,  Woes references the WEF,  Klaus Shwab and YN Harare, and their nefarious plans for a dystopian future.   The speaker then brings up ‘teleology’ – the directedness of history, or evolution;  the singularity,  the end of history. ‘no matter where you begin,  you always circle the drain until you reach ‘the end of history’

Then Woes,  taking the conversation in another direction,  talks about some left-brained person he knew who ‘preferred an elegant analysis to a messy reality’ -  which although a diversion from the topic of eugenics is itself quite an interesting point – people become bewitched by their own ideas,  they fall in love with their own damn cleverness,  and fuck reality if it doesn’t want to fall into line – who needs reality when one has such beautiful ideas.  

The speaker responds something on the lines that he doesn’t have any time for psychology as a discipline – sounds to me that he could usefully apply some to find out where his own thinking is coming from.   You have to laugh at the obvious denial when Woes asks him if he thinks his thought is influenced by emotion, and he says with complete seriousness that he thinks his ideas are driven not by emotion,  but by pragmatism.     He seems to overlook the broader import of Woes’ question,  and answers only with reference to Woes’ left-brained friend  - saying that ideas are not a matter of aesthetics but need to prove themselves in their application,

Then he says bizarrely,  ‘in bargaining for my own value, I can’t just appeal to sentimentalism: well, my mom really loves me’  - bizarre,  because who’s he bargaining with?  it sounds as if he thinks he’s in some scenario like facing the inquisitor in Red Dwarf,  which demanded that you justify your existence or get deleted from time and space. (the inquisitor turned out to be just yourself – psychologically interesting, eh?)  And why isn’t it enough that your mom really loves you?  Doesn’t she get a say? Why do her feelings count for nothing? on the other hand,  he seems to think that his success as a personal trainer in helping people to lose weight could justify his existence-  again, I don’t understand why he ranks those people’s satisfaction with his services above his mother’s love. (So what if they lose weight or not?  - like the universe really cares about that.)  he rambles on about how his success as a weight loss consultant will have saved money for the health care system (yes, because that’s the Supreme Value underlying existence) – ‘which can offset the cost of my own existence’ – it sounds like he’s imbibed some of the ambient propaganda of our time which imbues us with guilt for simply being alive:  all that ‘useless eater / you’re destroying the planet’ kind of guff.

He denies that simply being human has any value per se:  there needs to be some added value,  some ‘merit’  - Woes struggles to answer a question about what he values in human beings,  -  it’s not whether YOU value them,  fuckwit, (personally speaking, I’m sick to death of human beings, I’m so done with them, they can all fall into a bottomless pit tomorrow as far as I’m concerned)  it’s whether THE UNIVERSE values them ; it’s whether GOD (the real one, who we nevertheless continue to intuit behind all those impostor-gods) values them.

Speaker then goes on to say that he wishes he had understood when growing up that he would not be guaranteed ‘a meaningful role in society’ ‘there are only 50 seats on the bus, and 300 people want to get on there’ -  he says that people in the west are raised to believe they are a puzzle piece that will fit in somewhere.

I guess he is right in that ‘the system’ does indeed hold out false promises to us.  It encourages us to trust in it and believe in it, when in reality it has nothing to offer us (unless we are willing to sell our souls to satan) - but he comes to all the wrong conclusions,  or he is looking at the picture in a skewed way, -I would say fuck that bus,  why would you want to be allocated a place on it anyway, where on earth do you think it’s going, other than to hell in a handcart? – the response isn’t to kill yourself because you can’t get on the bus, but to find your own way, your own destination, and stop trying to join a club that will never admit you, (and which no sane person would want to be admitted to anyway)

Woes kind of instinctively reciprocates with psychological revelations of his own:  his inability to get over the shock that life wasn’t going to be as easy for him as he thought it would be .

The speaker warms to his next theme – his endorsement of suicide, and assisted suicide, ‘some people are not cut out for [the struggle of life]’  ‘it’s just a necessary relief valve for a lot of people’

What is my position on suicide?  It goes without saying that the state should not be involved,  (as the state should not be involved in anything at all, the state should not exist)  and I can kind of sympathise with the position that if all you’re going to do is whinge about this place (eg, me) then you might as well fuck off out of it – like those people who choose to stay in miserable jobs or relationships, and do nothing but whinge, as if frozen between trying to fix it and make it work on the one hand,  or completely writing it off and exiting it on the other,  they go round and round in pointless circles, broken record like.

But I think he and I focus on different perspectives here -  with me, it’s something spiritual, it’s your state of mind, attitude, courage, fighting spirit, something like that -  whereas he is fixated on the material – rambling on about ‘Darwinian filters’ and not having the right kind of genes.   He attributes the kind of human wreckage who has no stomach for life to feckless parenting – children who get born merely as a side-effect of their parents wanting to have sex, or from frivolous motives of sentimentality, and without any appreciation of the gravity of this act – in other words, the way most people embark on parenthood, and not all of them completely fuck it up. 

Woes notes that depressed people can be ‘comfortable in their depression’  - (yeh, I know all about that too) and he makes some comments about how children need to be inculcated with just enough egoism, but not too much, in order to make their way successfully in this world.   (I actually DON’T trace my depression back to my childhood, or my parents,  I think it was established by my adult life,  which was such a spectacular failure, a debacle of self-sabotage,  that self-disgust was the only sane response left to me – interestingly, I did experience an episode of it in my teenage years, but that’s probably because at some level we do know how it’s all going to play out) Woes:  ‘the guy basically knows failure, and that’s all he knows,  he knows defeat,  he knows humiliation, he knows how to be exploited, he knows despondency,  he knows demoralisation,  he knows pessimism,  he knows defeatism,  he knows defeat, he knows it over and over again…fundamentally he sees himself as a fuck up, beyond a certain age I don’t know if there is anything you can do’  - describing a kind of Stockholm syndrome of your own mental prison.  And I think it’s that ‘over and over again’ thing -  you can suffer one or two setbacks in your life,  you can pick yourself up and get over them, but you can’t keep doing that indefinitely, with nothing on the other side of the balance sheet,  there comes a point when your resources are just depleted,  there’s no more fight left in you.

Speaker says that ‘even if you could reform these people the amount of investment could never be justified, because it could have gone to somebody else’   once again coming back to his Malthusian preoccupation with the idea of limited resources, of everybody fighting for a piece of the pie.

He then says he thinks he’s helped a lot of people (I think he means in his career as a weight loss coach?) ‘if they give me an inch, I’ll give them 500 miles’  My job nominally involves ‘helping people’ too,  but in fact I don’t really believe in it – if people solve their problem or achieve their goal, that’s down to them, nobody can really do it for them.  At the most, the role of people in the ‘helping professions’  is ancillary – very little (if any) of the credit is really attributable to them. You’re just a resource – one among many, and completely fungible.   Which is what makes it so odd that he bases his entire sense of self-worth on this kind of thing. 

Speaker:  ‘we’ve left the problem [ie, of depressed people, inadequate people, people who hate their own lives] too long, which increases the demand for authority to intervene’ He says that depopulation is ‘demographic chemotherapy’  (yeh, well, chemotherapy – I don’t believe in that either) the cost of not doing it, he says,  will be our extinction.

My view on that would be – so be it.  The ends never justify the means;  we are here to do  the right thing,  live in accordance with true morality – not to survive forever, and if we have to choose between truth and death, it’s a no brainer, every time.   If the end is really coming- then I say bring it on.  And who is this fucking ‘authority’ that we are going to call upon to intervene and fix the problem for us?  The santa-claus government, I suppose – the all-powerful, all-knowing government, in eternal watchfulness over all us little people, always ready to step in and save the day when we fuck up and drop the ball.

He's back on ‘them’ ‘reducing us to a state of animalism, if not extinction’  (who now? Depressed people,  people who hate their lives? – they’re the ones who are dragging everybody into animalism?)

Next: he takes a pop at the human-centred view of reality, what he calls ‘the protagonist complex’ – ‘we don’t view ourselves as a small piece of a much greater picture’   ‘a lot of people that we call human,  I think they’re animals, there’s no difference’ (well, that’s certainly how our masters see us – and not without  reason)   He mentions Isaac Newton again:  ‘…this beauty and knowledge, culminating in a great man, an Isaac Newton’  [so only Isaac Newton can claim the right to exist?  But who exactly is Isaac Newton serving, if humans in general are so shit?  What’s the point of being ‘a great man’ in a moral vacuum?] ‘the default condition of man is barbarism’ – Woes agrees,  but I don’t.  The default condition of man is not a barbarian, but a sheep – man is a slave race, livestock.    Woes blathers on about civilisation being a thin veneer, the need for law and order, or the fear of god, to keep people under control… then he says,  ‘people just don’t care about being good for its own sake’  - yes, that’s probably true,  they don’t – any more than livestock does.  You don’t expect them to think,  you just put up the electric fences,  the cattle grids,  the cattle prods. 

Speaker brings up a few more of his bete-noires – people who have no self-restraint,  no capacity to defer gratification,  of which the visual epitome for him is obese people,  (tackling other people’s obesity being the sole thing which supposedly gave his life any meaning or value at all) – there is no doubt at all in his mind that this lack of self-restraint and inability to defer gratification is the sole explanation for obesity – I see he is totally bought into the mainstream lying narrative that obesity is just what happens to you if you’re always popping into McDonald’s or KFC,  or can’t control yourself around a bag of doughnuts.  He no doubt thinks that if you ‘eat in moderation’ ,  do a bit of exercise,  seldom eat fast food,   then of course you will never be troubled by obesity, will you.  Course not.  Obesity is no more than a just punishment for gluttony,  the visible public shaming of a secret vice.  ‘I see people that will have 4 cans of pepsi with their dinner’ he says.  (yeh,  so do I – but they’re not necessarily the obese ones) – and of course he proceeds to the trope that  gutbuckets such as these ‘take more than what they put into the public healthcare’  (they never mention do they that since they also die much younger this expense, if any, will be set off in savings on their old age pensions) – he suggests that these weak-willed people who can’t live responsibly in a society with sugar,  need to be taken in hand by authority in the interests of those who have the self-control not to indulge to excess.

His system – ‘negative eugenics’ – he admits requires ‘a big authoritarian state to come in and say hey you didn’t qualify for reproduction, sorry’  ‘I don’t believe in anarchy, I believe in  the furthest thing from it, I believe in a big state which protects the market from rent-seeking, predation, parasitism’  -   when he says ‘believes in’ he is simply saying ‘I wish there was such a thing’  - leaving aside the inconvenient truth that there isn’t, and never could be – not in the sense that he has in mind.  What we actually have is a predatory ruling class that panders to this kind of wishful thinking and fantasising, feeding into it with its propaganda,  while making slaves of us all – and applying eugenics to create the desirable traits of slaves,  which are certainly not the kind of traits that he thinks human beings should have – they probably have no use for weight loss coaches for example,  and conversely plenty of space for obese people,  who  will be just the kind of human they want – chronically sick consumers of pharma products, who will probably never reproduce, and will die young.  

Woes kind of tangentially approaches my position when he says something on the lines of,  ‘what’s the point of talking about any of this when we don’t even have our own society’ – he is of course focusing on his own fixation of white replacement, implemented by a treacherous ruling class– although I do think in his case this bete-noire of his has served to bring  him into contact with some idea of what is actually going on in this world, with the much broader picture of which this is a mere symptom, much as covid did with me   - as he says, ‘we’ are not the ones in charge,  ‘we’ are not the elites,  ‘we’ do not get to decide on the eugenics programme to be implemented, if any.

But the speaker is stuck on his groove of genotypes and phenotypes,  preferring this kind of terminology to the  more antiquated and outdated racial terminology,  and he starts rambling on again in reply,  - it’s not that blue eyes and blonde hair are more valuable and desirable than say negroid traits, he wants to say, but they tend to be correlated with the traits he personally does find valuable.  His explanation for higher rates of criminality among black populations is that white races implemented capital punishment, thus filtering dangerous criminals out of the gene pool.  Superior races get to be superior precisely on account of these kinds of measures of racial hygiene. 

He doesn’t understand Brave New World, which he thinks paints an optimistic picture of the future (ie, he would like to live in a society like this) – BNW was in fact a comedy, a satire,  in which Huxley was sending up the eugenicists,  the utopians, it’s not a dark or foreboding book like ‘1984’,  it’s more light-hearted and facetious in its intent.

Conclusion:  I think to some extent the speaker is describing a real problem (ie, what to do about the underclass) – I think his biggest mistake is the extremely common one of narrowly focusing on a very local, parochial symptom,  of failing to see the bigger picture in which it is but a small detail, and therefore to understand quite how radical the solution (which may not even be possible at all – personally I don’t think it is ) would need to be  (yes, more radical than genocide – that’s just a bit of desultory tinkering)   This world is fucked up, totally fucked up, it’s not an OK system that just needs a bit of tweaking here and there- ‘if only we could stop all these damn window-lickers from breeding like rabbits, everything would be fine’  just as in other people with other fixations will say ‘if only we could get rid of all those damn banksters and fix the monetary system, everything would be fine’  or ‘if only we could put a stop to white replacement, everything would be fine’  - no it would not be fucking fine,  because you don’t solve the problem by removing some of its symptoms – you need to go beyond those to get to the root causes,  you need to take the whole system apart in its entirety – what is needed is a complete dismantling of a world that is vile beyond saving