........................................................................................ - a weBlog by Snowy and me.

Tuesday 12 July 2016

How The Power Of Speech Breeds The Ego

'Survival of the fittest' was a phrase coined by Francis Galton,  
a cousin of Charles Darwin to summarise Darwin's ideas.

Alas Galton missed the point of Darwin's science.
Survival by adaption, via co-dependence, 
is far more positive as proof of fitness
than being, or believing your species to be, 
the apogee of a hierarchy. 
Saying you are fitter than everyone else is ego,
which is something animals don't do.

But Galton's world was built on ego.
Through coining his phrase he advanced the Eugenics Movement.
Galton's science was the competitive [mis]breeding of cattle,
then dogs for display, and making his profit from the shows.
What in the 1870's started out as selective breeding in animals
had by the 1920's became the mass sterilisation of the human poor
and thousands of women concidered to be mental defectives.
The idea would cause a world war before it was halted. 

False states of human superiority long predate Galton,
he just their latest servant. But even now many Capitalists
in their detachment see those whose labour they profit  from
as sub-human-the way Galton saw his animals. The main problem
for those who recognise their being seen as sub-human have
is deciding, as they vocally resist, 'Are we as egotistal as our accusers?'.

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