Soixante-Retard wrote:Could you help me, please, to understand what Social Darwinism means to you and what it implies?
Social darwinism typically means a system in which there is no state safety net, state socialist spending, or nanny state laws, and there is legally-sanctioned natural competition going on between individuals and/or groups, which has big consequences for the individuals or groups that fail (like poverty, starvation, and/or death). There can be different variants of social darwinism.
-Though it might conceivably also include non-competitive variants, as Taxizen has suggested, in which self-contained voluntary groups sustain the natural consequences of their actions. However, that would not be effective for natural selection unless the natural environment were very harsh, harsh enough to kill lots of people.
Different types of social darwinism can vary according to the rules of the competition, so social darwinism can be either eugenic or dysgenic depending upon those rules.
Capitalism (with no safety net) is often considered social darwinism, but in truth it is unnatural pseudo social darwinism, in which the game board is steeply tilted in favor of the rentiers before the starting gun is fired, and said rentiers determine the fate of others based upon their extrinsic human whims rather than letting nature select individuals based upon their natural competitive capacity.
But even
natural selection does not always yield eugenic effects; it can also yield dysgenic effects, when it selects for the psychological trait of genetic jealousy, in which there is positive selection for people who kill or otherwise impair the most capable individuals. Genetic jealousy is the evolutionary origin of government tyranny. Also, if one individual or group has access to resources that are significantly greater than those which another individual or group has access to, then they gain an unfair advantage that is potentially dysgenic, therefore a eugenic system of social darwinism must control the non-genetic variables, as is the case in distributism. When it comes to war between groups, the variables of natural resources, population, and elapsed time for infrastructure development must be controlled in order for the war to be reliably eugenic.
Eugenic social darwinism has an advantage over government-run eugenics, because the government (which is comprised of fallible humans) can never be trusted to be objective and wise in it's breeding decisions; only nature itself can be trusted to be objective and wise. The humans comprising the government can even apply genetic jealousy to their selective breeding policy, thus turning a potentially eugenic policy into a dysgenic policy.