When punters down at the casino continue to believe that they can beat the odds , we call them gamblers.
But when PhDs believed they can beat the odds, we called them modern scientists.
And modern planners and modern statesmen and modern leaders of industry.
Efforts to 'drain the gene pool'* to just a few types is a form of scientific gambling.
It is done by eugenists' sterilization schemes and by their slow coding of the 'unfit' and by outright mass genocide.
Implicitly , it says we humans think we can predict the whole course of the future as far ahead as the mind can see --- and the few genetic types we have picked are perfect to combat whatever surprises future chance can throw at us.
You can't get more collective hubris in one room than that ....
* The term Draining the Gene Pool , by the way, was first used in print (in its current sarcastic sense), in the years immediately after WWII's end had revealed the Nazi attempts to 'drain it' by euthanasia and genocide .
It thus is one of the first neologisms of our current post-Modern Era.
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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