Skip to main content

How did Social Darwinists tend to view government aid to industries and other institutions?

Social Darwinists were (and are) generally opposed to government aid to anyone, indeed to aid to anyone, at least any aid that is not paid for and in the direct self-interest of the person providing it. They opposed welfare, social insurance, foreign aid, and even public infrastructure.

Based (loosely) on Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Social Darwinists argued that the way to achieve the best outcome in any system, be it biological, economic, or social, is to simply let all the different agents fiercely compete with one another, a constant war of all against all, and to the victor go the spoils. They theorized that this would ensure that the ones who win---and therefore the genes and individuals that survive---would be the best and the strongest.

They also believed that any attempt to intervene in that competition would ultimately be harmful; by helping those who would otherwise fail or handicapping those who would otherwise succeed, intervention in the natural state of competition would only allow the weak and inferior to prosper.

Today we know that this is not at all what evolutionary theory actually implies. Indeed, one of the central reasons why humans are so successful is that we cooperate with one another, forgoing our own narrow self-interest for the good of our tribe, our culture, our nation. Cooperative behavior is common across many species, and particularly among intelligent social species such as ourselves. Social Darwinists believed that they were applying evolution to understand human nature, but in fact they were distorting evolution and fighting human nature.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

Is 'efficate' a word in English?

I routinely hear the word "efficate" being used. For example, "The most powerful way to efficate a change in the system is to participate." I do not find entries for this word in common English dictionaries, but I do not have an unabridged dictionary. I have checked the OED (I'm not sure if it is considered unabridged), and it has no entry for "efficate". It does have an entry for "efficiate", which is used in the same way. Wordnik has an entry for "efficate" with over 1800 hits, thus providing some evidence for the frequency of use. I personally like the word and find the meaning very clear and obvious when others use it. If it's not currently an "officially documented" word, perhaps its continued use will result in it being better documented.