Low Biological Quality of Humankind
It's taboo to even mention a range of topics, because they'll make some people feel uncomfortable. Having seen how well this empire of not offending some people has steered us into an ecocidal evolutionary dead end, I'm not inclined to care: their empire failed, in a way that ancient civilization and the NSDAP could not (you'll recall that many great artists are only discovered after life has defeated them and buried them in pauper's graves; so it will be with tradition).
How did their empire come about? Impetus toward creating civilization was lost, because civilization itself got wealthy and powerful. The parasites came in, and seduced the women and compassionate men, who rapidly gave way to "new" ideas (there are no new ideas, only good ones or bad ones; originality is a separate concept, and applies to how well you describe an idea in art or discourse). These "new" ideas consisted mainly of vast profit to be made by manipulating hordes of dumber people.
Over time, because the fundamental assumption of these "new" ideas was a lack of responsibility to the unitive whole of nature and cosmos and humankind, as was provided by the religion-philosophies of ancient civilizations, these philosophies expanded scope (as all philosophies tend to do; it's a "slippery slope" argument that applies in every case) and came to include the empowerment of the general masses. This meant giving them a vote equal to that of people who were smarter, healthier and of better moral character than they.
Herein was the disaster.
At this point, you have a society which promotes dumb, ugly and destructive people over those who have more beneficial traits, simply because dumb, ugly and destructive people have a need to disunitively make profit at the expense of others. Most people who were born into a bad body/mind tend to be destructive, and if they're smarter than the absolute bottom, they become shrewd because that allows them to be remarkably intellectually effective - albeit within a narrow and meaningless space. They become experts at making money, usually through sleazy means, as did the Snopes family in Faulkner's "The Hamlet."
Soon the dumb, ugly and mean guys get the pretty girls, because no matter how disgusting you are as a person, if you have wealth, well, in a society of equals that's the most important thing, and therefore you'll be a good parent. Your kids will probably be wealthy too. Over many generations, this equates into a dying out of the better people and the promotion of the greedy, stupid, violent, etc. In short, it's counter-evolution, or a destruction of what evolution has done through greed and egoism, which as you can see are the motivating forces behind "equality."
At this point, most people are of low biological quality, as measured in the three indexes:
# Intelligence. Whether you measure it with an IQ test, or watching them in a revelatory activity, intelligence can be measured, although you usually have to be at least as intelligent as what you're measuring to get any kind of exact figure (this explains high school guidance counselors and their destructive, weird and revengeful decisions, doesn't it?). However, intelligence is an inborn property. You do not get a genius out of a turnip-picker, no matter what the popular media says. Find some genius born "magically" to two stupid parents and you'll either find an adoption or a genius grandparent.
# Health and Beauty. People who are well-formed, who are naturally healthy and who tend toward healthy decisions are usually the most physically able. They may not be great athletes in a specialized sport, but in terms of general ability to do things like get around and survive in a forest or battle, they're absolutely qualified (note that many major league players would not qualify, as the history of athletes in combat bears out). People who are well-bred tend to have health and beauty as well as intelligence and moral character.
# Moral character. This is a difficult definition, but a good starting point is this: one's natural inclinations and values are inborn, although they can be changed by post-birth treatment, especially abuse. These inborn tendencies where they touch on ethical questions form one's moral character. By moral, I do not mean the binary "don't kill, hurt or offend any person" morality of Judeo-Christianity, but the holistic morality of the ancients: doing what is right by the order of the cosmos. In some cases this means killing; in other cases, healing. There is no clear absolute rule for it, and that's why the ability of the individual to perceive it - this ability varies widely between individuals - is quite important, and complex enough that it can only be conveyed by years of positive breeding.
When I look around the average American community, there's a very clear low biological intelligence factor. People waiting in line at McDonalds for twenty minutes, wasting gasoline and paying high prices for very bad food. People who cannot drive, even though it's a simple process, mainly because their attention spans wander and they exist in a slow-motion dream of their own distraction. What about all the true idiots one encounters in offices and stores, who can be guaranteed to miss the obvious and thus take the long way around to solving any problem, wasting tons of your time?
Even further, look at what people buy. That most people will buy a $3.99 plastic widget instead of a $5.99 metal one of the same function that will last twice as long shows not only a basic ignorance of math (6/2 = 3, not 4), but a total lack of moral character, in that they prefer cheap garbage that clogs landfills to something of enduring presence. Maybe they don't trust themselves not to destroy it? And what did they spend that "saved" $2 on, anyway? Oh: beer and DVDs.
Something tells me this people will never be appreciating Beethoven, or even Emperor. They aren't going to read Conrad, or even Crichton. They're never going to see past the lies of Bill Clinton, or of George Bush. They're consumers, pure and simple, and they cannot appreciate anything subtle in life, or anything that demands knowledge of structure and not merely external form. Yet we're breeding more of these and squeezing out the smart people, because even a total fool can narrow his sights on commerce and make a lot of money in a specific area - and plenty of them do.
Bill Gates, for example, couldn't survive a night in a forest armed with only a pocketknife. Steve Jobs wouldn't last as long as Bill would. And Paris Hilton? John Kerry? Britney Spears?
We're descending in not only ideology and lifestyle, here on planet earth, but also in terms of biological quality. We're failing it on the "producing better humans" front, and because so many people are dumb as rocks and without moral character, we deconstruct and simplify and abstract anything we write, see, hear, do so that everyone in the room can get it, in the process obliterating meaning for the few who actually matter.
As our current society begins to fall apart, starting first with its higher functions and moving into all aspects of its homeostasis, it at the same time confronts some obvious truths that people have been ducking since the 1950s, namely that pollution, energy depletion, overpopulation and entertainment culture really do turn us into elaborate hamsters who are guaranteed to die of cancer in some crime-infested hole of a city. This process has inspired new impulses toward purging the world of waste.
Our best ecological experts, namely the ones who are alert to the full depth of the problem, suggest 500 million people on earth. If we're going to trim back people, when we grow up and get over our pretense, it makes sense to select the best 500 million by intelligence, health/beauty and moral character, so that humanity as a whole improves instead of staying at the same level of mediocrity with simply lower numbers. In this respect, it's fortunate that our society is falling apart, as it gives us a chance to clear out the dummies and start working toward higher biological quality again.
Interestingly, a eugenic society would require almost no internal changes. If suddenly we moved up a grade, the people who would be left would use our extant social and political systems for sensible goals, because there would no longer be hordes of morons to manipulate with demagoguery and fancy products. We wouldn't even have to change religions, as smart people interpreting Christianity would start it off on a more realistic, nature-friendly footing.
Now that we've gone so far into the void, it doesn't look like we could come back, but it's entirely possible we can, especially if our first step is to upgrade our genetics by slaughtering fools, morons, criminals and other blockheads who impede sensible living for those fortunate enough to be well-bred. I have a strange feeling that in this future society, there'd be a lot fewer taboos about discussing intelligence and biological quality of humankind.
July 20, 2005
http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/quality/
It's taboo to even mention a range of topics, because they'll make some people feel uncomfortable. Having seen how well this empire of not offending some people has steered us into an ecocidal evolutionary dead end, I'm not inclined to care: their empire failed, in a way that ancient civilization and the NSDAP could not (you'll recall that many great artists are only discovered after life has defeated them and buried them in pauper's graves; so it will be with tradition).
How did their empire come about? Impetus toward creating civilization was lost, because civilization itself got wealthy and powerful. The parasites came in, and seduced the women and compassionate men, who rapidly gave way to "new" ideas (there are no new ideas, only good ones or bad ones; originality is a separate concept, and applies to how well you describe an idea in art or discourse). These "new" ideas consisted mainly of vast profit to be made by manipulating hordes of dumber people.
Over time, because the fundamental assumption of these "new" ideas was a lack of responsibility to the unitive whole of nature and cosmos and humankind, as was provided by the religion-philosophies of ancient civilizations, these philosophies expanded scope (as all philosophies tend to do; it's a "slippery slope" argument that applies in every case) and came to include the empowerment of the general masses. This meant giving them a vote equal to that of people who were smarter, healthier and of better moral character than they.
Herein was the disaster.
At this point, you have a society which promotes dumb, ugly and destructive people over those who have more beneficial traits, simply because dumb, ugly and destructive people have a need to disunitively make profit at the expense of others. Most people who were born into a bad body/mind tend to be destructive, and if they're smarter than the absolute bottom, they become shrewd because that allows them to be remarkably intellectually effective - albeit within a narrow and meaningless space. They become experts at making money, usually through sleazy means, as did the Snopes family in Faulkner's "The Hamlet."
Soon the dumb, ugly and mean guys get the pretty girls, because no matter how disgusting you are as a person, if you have wealth, well, in a society of equals that's the most important thing, and therefore you'll be a good parent. Your kids will probably be wealthy too. Over many generations, this equates into a dying out of the better people and the promotion of the greedy, stupid, violent, etc. In short, it's counter-evolution, or a destruction of what evolution has done through greed and egoism, which as you can see are the motivating forces behind "equality."
At this point, most people are of low biological quality, as measured in the three indexes:
# Intelligence. Whether you measure it with an IQ test, or watching them in a revelatory activity, intelligence can be measured, although you usually have to be at least as intelligent as what you're measuring to get any kind of exact figure (this explains high school guidance counselors and their destructive, weird and revengeful decisions, doesn't it?). However, intelligence is an inborn property. You do not get a genius out of a turnip-picker, no matter what the popular media says. Find some genius born "magically" to two stupid parents and you'll either find an adoption or a genius grandparent.
# Health and Beauty. People who are well-formed, who are naturally healthy and who tend toward healthy decisions are usually the most physically able. They may not be great athletes in a specialized sport, but in terms of general ability to do things like get around and survive in a forest or battle, they're absolutely qualified (note that many major league players would not qualify, as the history of athletes in combat bears out). People who are well-bred tend to have health and beauty as well as intelligence and moral character.
# Moral character. This is a difficult definition, but a good starting point is this: one's natural inclinations and values are inborn, although they can be changed by post-birth treatment, especially abuse. These inborn tendencies where they touch on ethical questions form one's moral character. By moral, I do not mean the binary "don't kill, hurt or offend any person" morality of Judeo-Christianity, but the holistic morality of the ancients: doing what is right by the order of the cosmos. In some cases this means killing; in other cases, healing. There is no clear absolute rule for it, and that's why the ability of the individual to perceive it - this ability varies widely between individuals - is quite important, and complex enough that it can only be conveyed by years of positive breeding.
When I look around the average American community, there's a very clear low biological intelligence factor. People waiting in line at McDonalds for twenty minutes, wasting gasoline and paying high prices for very bad food. People who cannot drive, even though it's a simple process, mainly because their attention spans wander and they exist in a slow-motion dream of their own distraction. What about all the true idiots one encounters in offices and stores, who can be guaranteed to miss the obvious and thus take the long way around to solving any problem, wasting tons of your time?
Even further, look at what people buy. That most people will buy a $3.99 plastic widget instead of a $5.99 metal one of the same function that will last twice as long shows not only a basic ignorance of math (6/2 = 3, not 4), but a total lack of moral character, in that they prefer cheap garbage that clogs landfills to something of enduring presence. Maybe they don't trust themselves not to destroy it? And what did they spend that "saved" $2 on, anyway? Oh: beer and DVDs.
Something tells me this people will never be appreciating Beethoven, or even Emperor. They aren't going to read Conrad, or even Crichton. They're never going to see past the lies of Bill Clinton, or of George Bush. They're consumers, pure and simple, and they cannot appreciate anything subtle in life, or anything that demands knowledge of structure and not merely external form. Yet we're breeding more of these and squeezing out the smart people, because even a total fool can narrow his sights on commerce and make a lot of money in a specific area - and plenty of them do.
Bill Gates, for example, couldn't survive a night in a forest armed with only a pocketknife. Steve Jobs wouldn't last as long as Bill would. And Paris Hilton? John Kerry? Britney Spears?
We're descending in not only ideology and lifestyle, here on planet earth, but also in terms of biological quality. We're failing it on the "producing better humans" front, and because so many people are dumb as rocks and without moral character, we deconstruct and simplify and abstract anything we write, see, hear, do so that everyone in the room can get it, in the process obliterating meaning for the few who actually matter.
As our current society begins to fall apart, starting first with its higher functions and moving into all aspects of its homeostasis, it at the same time confronts some obvious truths that people have been ducking since the 1950s, namely that pollution, energy depletion, overpopulation and entertainment culture really do turn us into elaborate hamsters who are guaranteed to die of cancer in some crime-infested hole of a city. This process has inspired new impulses toward purging the world of waste.
Our best ecological experts, namely the ones who are alert to the full depth of the problem, suggest 500 million people on earth. If we're going to trim back people, when we grow up and get over our pretense, it makes sense to select the best 500 million by intelligence, health/beauty and moral character, so that humanity as a whole improves instead of staying at the same level of mediocrity with simply lower numbers. In this respect, it's fortunate that our society is falling apart, as it gives us a chance to clear out the dummies and start working toward higher biological quality again.
Interestingly, a eugenic society would require almost no internal changes. If suddenly we moved up a grade, the people who would be left would use our extant social and political systems for sensible goals, because there would no longer be hordes of morons to manipulate with demagoguery and fancy products. We wouldn't even have to change religions, as smart people interpreting Christianity would start it off on a more realistic, nature-friendly footing.
Now that we've gone so far into the void, it doesn't look like we could come back, but it's entirely possible we can, especially if our first step is to upgrade our genetics by slaughtering fools, morons, criminals and other blockheads who impede sensible living for those fortunate enough to be well-bred. I have a strange feeling that in this future society, there'd be a lot fewer taboos about discussing intelligence and biological quality of humankind.
July 20, 2005
http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/quality/
