re: #126 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

Funny that Social Darwinism is big among people who reject Evolution.

I would disagree. Spencer and ilk took the aesthetics of Darwin’s ideas to dress up the already-existing European racism and classism—the belief there’s a natural order, and it has already chosen winners and losers on a human scale and thus The System Is Right—and people loved it.

Darwin’s selection of the fittest is about context—the “fit” between animal and viable niche across generations, which changes chaotically and without direction—which is directly contradictory to the idea of natural hierarchy. The closest thing to Darwinian thinking about human culture would be Boasian anthropology, where you look at the “logic” of a culture’s survival within its environment on its own terms.

Ayn Rand explained that we had the right to take the land from the natives because they were not making proper use of it.

And that it was obviously up to us to determine what that “proper use” was

Yeah, Rand was a Social Darwinist with extra steps. A lot of her work is Bizarro Marxism—if Karl said it was bad it was good—and the rest is reading Aristotle and Plato in a very shallow way. She’s also a pretty class example of That Kind of Person that turns everything into a rhetorical contest.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence she gets so much love from business people, economists, and greedy fuckers, because what they all have in common is need to belief that money is real and that there’s a moral and hierarchical character to the accumulation of money. Making the number go higher is Good and smart in absolute terms, not in made-up relative terms because money is an token of value and value is largely irrational and aesthetic.