Social Darwinism=Nazism?

[inquisitive_socialist]

so reading the topic on suicide pills i noticed someone equate the two. thats only slightly fucking retarded. social darwinism, at least conceptually, makes more sense than most of the garbled nonsense people spout on this forum. to me at least. and to equate it with fascist ideals is stupid. how do you get from letting people eliminate themselves, to forcing people into elimination? WTF, MATE?

[pusher robot]

Originally posted by [email protected] 23, 2007 02:30 am
so reading the topic on suicide pills i noticed someone equate the two. thats only slightly fucking retarded. social darwinism, at least conceptually, makes more sense than most of the garbled nonsense people spout on this forum. to me at least. and to equate it with fascist ideals is stupid. how do you get from letting people eliminate themselves, to forcing people into elimination? WTF, MATE?
The answer is that the science of "social dawinism" was in fact the scientific framework that undergirded a lot of the nazi's beliefs on racial identity and racial purity. People forget that this science was not particular to Germany - in fact, it was highly admired in the United States and was responsible for some "genetic hygine" follies of our own, like antimiscegination laws and the forced sterilization of the mentally deficient (about which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously remarked, "three generations of idiots is enough.")

Ultimately, many of the scientific theories were discredited and the more obviously racist policy goals abandoned, and much of that had to do with the fact that the Nazis had the ideology of national socialism - fascism, if you wish - but they had the science of social darwinism. The exposure of what the atrocities they unleashed with what they thought were real scientific justifications seriously discredited the entire movement.

The reason it was brought up in the other thread had to do with the OP's implication that assisting in whatever way the extermination of people who were apparently "undesirable" in some way would be a laudable policy goal. These sorts of policy goals have been considered totally unacceptable for some seventy years.

[IcarusAngel]

Social Darwinism was indeed a basis for much of the line of thinking of the Nazis. Social Darwinism is also apparent today in some forms of the "deep ecology" movement and elements of the left-wing extreme of the environmental movement. For example, even some humanists believe in dramatic population reduction because the thinking goes that when there's too many people, they'll end up destroying the earth, wasting resources, which inevitably lead to conflicts, and so on. This puts us all at risk and wastes too many lives through starvation etc. so they support "popular control."

It isn't just the extreme right (nazis) or left (humanists) who advocate some form of social darwinism, though. Capitalism, too, is thought as being social darwinistic -- "the strongest survive" in the business world. Andrew Carnegie, the steel tycoon, John D. Rockefeller, and so on, applied Social Darwinistic theories to the business world.

You don't understand the trustbusters, all the hearings, and all the anti-trust, anti-monopoly acts that had to happen because of this until you understand how that reasoning lead to such giant oligopolies.

Really none of thise has much to do with Darwinian evolution. What does creating a business and ripping off consumers have to do with survival of the fittest, chemical imperialism, and maximizing gene reproduction? It doesn't.

So while Social Darwinism may sound reasonable in some cases, it's usually a failure in practice and Nazism, free-market capitalism, the eugenics movement etc. are all pretty much outdated theories, rationally speaking.

[Idola Mentis]

Social darwinism is junk science. That communists and anarchists are able to accept such ideas as part of their ideology shocks me deeply, as I've never before encountered any modern who didn't agree that these ways of thought are completely incompatible. I sincerely thought the ideological awareness and consequence of thought within the left was greater than that.

You really think "letting" people eliminate themselves is necessarily different from forcing them? Try to look closer at the world you're living in. When we are "allowed" to do something of consequence, it's rarely a true choice. At best, it is a choice between two alternatives made for us, where we had no hand in the making of the conditions which created our options. Given the choice between plague and cholera, would you be grateful to be "allowed" to choose plague? In a true choice, you do not have the alternatives presented to you, you play a part in the making of the choice itself.

Isn't this part of the core of socialism? The means of production define our space of action. Without control of the means of production, we are as trapped as any plantation slave.

This is the choice as suicides see it - not necessarily as it really is, but their condition, generally severe depression, limits their ability to see alternatives: Live in misery, or die. And even then, most would actually prefer misery to death. But hey, along comes some SD twerp and tells them it would actually improve the world if they died!

Is that a choice made by a free, informed individual?

We exist on the brink of fascism. Only the threat of revolution and a shred of conscience make those in power keep letting us stamp our feet for yes or no when they shape the choices we have in our lives. Social Darwinism is one of the excuses they tell themselves to be able to sleep at night. It's one of the thoughts that allow one man to think that he has the right to tell another man to be his slave or starve, that he, by virtue of being able to, has the right to despise, direct and dispose of the weak. Social darwinism is part of the heel that keeps us down; any ideology including it is open to become such a heel, no matter how much you pad it in silk.

[Comrade_de_Crosebi]

So, you're calling Nature "junk science"? I admit I love Marxism, as a political way but too many "so-called" Marxist believe Nature doesnt exist and we should destroy the strong so the weak can live a little longer. Wake up. Life isnt pretty.

[Idola Mentis]

Originally posted by [email protected] 24, 2007 08:32 am
So, you're calling Nature "junk science"?(...)
I was initially dumbstruck at this comment. Now I'm just laughing my hairy arse off.

Not that it's relevant to the veracity of the claims of social darwinism, but yes, I would call "Nature" junk science too, if asked. It's a whore word, available to anyone who needs it to pad out their rhetorical antics. Therefore undefinable and without reference to any actual substance.

Wait, you were just taking a poke at me, yes? You didn't really mean that?

[Jazzratt]

Originally posted by [email protected] 24, 2007 07:32 am
So, you're calling Nature "junk science"? I admit I love Marxism, as a political way but too many "so-called" Marxist believe Nature doesnt exist and we should destroy the strong so the weak can live a little longer. Wake up. Life isnt pretty.
Prove Social Darwinism is part of the natural mechanism. Oh right you can't. Stupid ****. :redstar2000:

[ichneumon]

actually, when we really look at ecology, the ideas of "dog eat dog" are not relevant. competition is inefficient. ecologies are held together by mutualistic networks - there can't be oaks without squirrels or squirrels without oaks. the jaguar/wolf whatever at the "top of the food chain" is almost superfluous, and realistically, such predators are crawling with parasites and lead brutal short lives.

the point being, what people call "social darwinism" is a thin excuse to be a nazi, and an insult to how nature really works. we can learn from nature - eg: a forest is a stable but dynamic anarchy of overlapping mutualisms. reciprocal altruism is the winning game, not hawk-aggression in the hawk-dove game. people who cite social darwinism are blindly ignorant about the realities of nature and evolution.

[pusher robot]

Originally posted by [email protected] 24, 2007 03:49 pm
actually, when we really look at ecology, the ideas of "dog eat dog" are not relevant. competition is inefficient. ecologies are held together by mutualistic networks - there can't be oaks without squirrels or squirrels without oaks. the jaguar/wolf whatever at the "top of the food chain" is almost superfluous, and realistically, such predators are crawling with parasites and lead brutal short lives.

the point being, what people call "social darwinism" is a thin excuse to be a nazi, and an insult to how nature really works. we can learn from nature - eg: a forest is a stable but dynamic anarchy of overlapping mutualisms. reciprocal altruism is the winning game, not hawk-aggression in the hawk-dove game. people who cite social darwinism are blindly ignorant about the realities of nature and evolution.
At the same time, you cannot anthropomorphize nature and draw lessons about human society or you are comitting the same error as the social darwinists. The sqirrel and the oak do not coexist by mutual agreement or altruistic motives! It is entirely and completely amoral. And you certainly cannot say that predators like wolves are superfluous - they are part of the environment that each species adapted to. Without them, the prey species are not checked and they will destroy their own habitat. In some cases (e.g., the wolf and the deer), humans have had to fill the role of predator, and when we shirk it, the prey actually suffer.

The point is, when you draw moral lessons from nature, you are actually subscribing to a kind of religion. Nature offers us facts, not morals.

[Idola Mentis]

Maybe we can agree that you can draw lessons from nature without looking like a complete fool, as long as you recognize that you are using a metaphor to clarify an idea, and do not rely on it to support your argument?

Come to think of it, even this is somewhat problematic, as the divide between natural and unnatural is hard to pin down. Fundamentals such as the observer principle makes this rather self-evident - anything "natural" we observe has already been influenced somewhat by human agency simply becuase we're there observing it. Any explanatory metaphor drawn from our perception of the "natural" must necessarily reinforce a concept the usage of which it is hard to defend to begin with.

[ichneumon]

At the same time, you cannot anthropomorphize nature and draw lessons about human society or you are comitting the same error as the social darwinists. The sqirrel and the oak do not coexist by mutual agreement or altruistic motives! It is entirely and completely amoral. And you certainly cannot say that predators like wolves are superfluous - they are part of the environment that each species adapted to. Without them, the prey species are not checked and they will destroy their own habitat. In some cases (e.g., the wolf and the deer), humans have had to fill the role of predator, and when we shirk it, the prey actually suffer.

The point is, when you draw moral lessons from nature, you are actually subscribing to a kind of religion. Nature offers us facts, not morals.

one - what humans *think* about is irrelevant to materialistic system that results.
i'm talking about taking the equations for energy flow that generate a steady but dynamic state and applying them to economics. economists and ecologists face a similar problem: how to model an extremely complex chaos system. the mathematical abstractions that we use are often strangely similar - only the systems they describe are radically different in that human economies are NOT steady-state. but, just maybe....

wolves are not completely superfluous, but the amount of attention humans pay to them is way out of proportion to their actual function.


Come to think of it, even this is somewhat problematic, as the divide between natural and unnatural is hard to pin down. Fundamentals such as the observer principle makes this rather self-evident - anything "natural" we observe has already been influenced somewhat by human agency simply becuase we're there observing it. Any explanatory metaphor drawn from our perception of the "natural" must necessarily reinforce a concept the usage of which it is hard to defend to begin with.

natural and unnatural are human constructions. life does not care - there is urban ecology, inside your body ecology, etc. ecologists are now trying to construct ecological models that start with carbon-nitrogen ratios and end with GDP. it's not easy - frankly, we don't have the math or computing power yet to do it. but it's not in the realm of the unsolvable. also, we need for sociologists to stop wanking around and do some math.