Fallacies of the eugenicists

Eugenics has a pretty bad reputation, but at the centre it's just people who want to make the world a better, more resilient place. Well, um, not, actually, that's not really true. Eugenicists take the view that modern society has a lot of substandard genetic stock floating around, making babies, and that this is a Bad Thing. It's a Bad Thing because that means that the good, strong people are having their genes diluted by the weak, feeble-minded majority, and this means that we will be more easily wiped out by some sort of plague or somesuch. The only possible conclusion is that we have to increase the "productivity" of the strong and decrease that of the weak. In practice, this has meant killing the weak, forcibly sterilising them, discouraging them from getting married, peddling contraception and abortion to them, and least distasteful of all, encouraging the "strong" to have more children. There are many fallacies bound in this view, and I want to go through a few of them because some are not so obvious.

Fallacy number 1: we're getting weaker.
Genetically speaking, this is perhaps true, in some ways. That's one of the things that makes it such a tempting thing to think about. The theory of evolution tells us that if you decrease selection pressure on a population then you will, on average, see those individuals that would not have been able to survive previously survive and have offspring. In our modern caring society many people who in the stone age would have died because of medical conditions no longer have their heads explode and thus pass on those defective genes to the next generation, making their condition more likely in the future.
Have you spotted the fallacy yet? Here it is: we have become weaker because fewer people are dying. Um, what? From an evolutionary standpoint, fewer members of a species dying means that they are stronger, better adapted, fitter. Modern society and technology gives us more machines meaning less toil, better medicine meaning when we get sick we have a good chance of getting better, more wealth meaning we have more varied and interesting lives. This is not called "things getting worse", so the idea that we are worse off with all these genetic degenerates is absolute crap.

Fallacy number 2: getting rid of the weak would make us stronger.
The idea here is that we should stop the weak having babies and make the strong have lots more babies to make up the shortfall. The result would be a stronger population overall and if calamity hit then we'd be better placed to weather it.
This fallacy is harder to spot, but have you seen it yet? Here it is: decreasing our genetic diversity would make us stronger. Um, what? Statistically speaking, a large population is fitter than a small one because it has more genetic variation, so even if we were subjected to a terrible catastrophe where a large fraction of the people died, the fact that there are more of us with more variability makes us more resilient, not less.

Fallacy number 3: some people have no significant value to society.
This one is true, actually - of the eugenicists, mostly, at least in their capacity as proponents of eugenics. The idea here is that people with severe genetic handicaps are totally pointless. There's no benefit to having them live - in fact, they are a nett drain on society's precious, finite resources. We'd be much better off screening against such people before birth and investing our resources in babies with sound physical and mental abilities. This particular view is fairly common nowadays - even though when you subject it to the light of truth it is monstrous - and it results in many abortions every year.
Spotted the fallacy yet? Here it is: some people are worth more dead than alive. Um, what? This comes out of a completely skewed view of the value of human life - specifically, that it is measured in economic terms. Practically this would mean that you need to earn your right to live, which means that if someone murdered you before you'd done that, it would be perfectly OK. It means that life is not a right, but a privilege which can be revoked by others. It means that you do not own your body, it is owned by others - perhaps medical experts. Since the right to life, or ownership of oneself, is the most fundamental principle of civilisation, this perspective can only make us worse-off (to put it mildly). The fact that this is a common justification for abortion shows how misguided some have become. Even if you consider abortion totally ordinary and not at all a bad thing, the view that results in abortions of babies who are deemed to be not worth raising is monstrous.

I hope that I have shown that the major beliefs of eugenics are simply ideological and have no basis in real improvements in society. They therefore have no place in society and I reserve the utmost rejection of these views and I will ostracise anyone coming to me with them severely. If we really want to improve society, we can do little better than provide the most freedom and private property that can be physically possible. That is what has made us the powerful society we are today and we seem to have largely forgotten it. Beware of anyone who says that some other person's life is not worthwhile. He is attacking the foundation of civilisation itself, and that is no understatement.