Before people start crying “social Darwinism”, please keep a couple of things in mind.
First, I have a dark sense of humor. I laugh at the Darwin awards and do often joke that seat belt laws and drug laws interfere with natural selection. It’s just a joke. I know very well that they don’t really. The reality is that seat belt laws don’t alter behavior. It’s been shown that people wear their seat belts at the same rate in states before and after the laws are passed so they’re really just about collecting more revenue from people who are only minding their own business. The reality is that most of the illegal drugs that people partake of are not nearly as harmful as we are led to believe, particularly marijuana.
Secondly, it’s just a comic strip. It’s not a blog post. There’s only so much that can be said in it. I don’t actually believe people are being bred to be stupid. What is happening is that they’re being trained out of the ability to think for themselves. What should happen is for people to be allowed to grow and develop and learn from their mistakes within reason. Of course charity has it’s place, but I want a world where there is less of a need for charity because we have fully adult people capable of caring for themselves. Then charity will be able to reach farther with less and easily meet the demands that exist. I do, however, believe that we are breeding poor businesses with state-capitalism.
On a side note, Darwin’s birthday was actually the twelfth.
Darwin was heroic.
Social Darwinism? Yuck, Dale. I mean, there is an element of truth to it, but I also think poor, weak, sick people should be shown compassion and served by private charities in a voluntary system. I hope you agree.
This seems like a good time to bring up this post: http://aaeblog.com/2009/02/12/darwin-200/
Make sure you read the comments on it too.
Very good reference, Darian. I wish I had said something about spontaneous order versus top down order. I believe that’s what I’m talking about to some extent in my updated post but I failed to use the term. I just made the update a short while ago. I think I’ll incorporate your link into the post.
OK, I’m going to change this cartoon and talk about spontaneous order rather than social Darwinism. I just can’t do it right this second. Check back later folks.
I don’t think you should change anything. I’ve found that making changes, even tiny ones, sometimes upset my readers. If you are regretting a decision you made, in the art or in your writing, own that and create something new because of it. Don’t try to re-write history.
Secondly, there’s continuity. Have you ever seen a forum where someone comments on an avatar, but now it’s a year later and the posts make NO sense at all? Comments, however valid, have that same issue.
Anarchy In Your Head is meant to be somewhat iconoclastic. That’s why I keep voting for it, reading it and passing it on.
I vote you keep it the same! I’m all about private charities helping the sick/weak/poor, but that’s not the point I got from the comic. I thought you were talking about the actual government regulating those things. A private charity helping a person in poverty is like a wolf helping another member of its pack that was injured. Darwin wouldn’t have minded that because it’s instinct. It’s part of natural selection. A government helping a failing business, however, is like the hand of some all-powerful God coming down from the sky and fixing the wolf’s injury with magic fairy dust and no consequence. I feel like they’re different things.
Points taken. I will not rewrite history.
So Nick you vote. I so no reason to change the cartoon but really I don’t care if it is changed and I don’t believe that someone should change a cartoon because I or otrhers want it changed. I would not tell an architect that he should design a building differently because I think that he should. THe reason is because an architect’s design is not collectively owned. A collective of people have no right to votre that an architect should change his design because the architect owns his idea. I am I too philosophical about this? Perhaps but that is my view on the matter.
Yeah, fuck the sun!
“I don’t actually believe people are being bred to be stupid.”
That is exactly what is happening.
Reply to Ganja Blue: I rally against ALL gunpoint wealth redistribution so we’re probably in agreement there. I do take exception to some private charity in cases where it is OBVIOUS that it serves to create even more of the strife it intends to diminish. For example, regardless of whether it’s the cat lady in NYC with fifty-seven felines in her apartment…or the UNICEF in Africa feeding people and enabling them to procreate and thus more hungry mouths to feed.
What happens to the cats when the lady dies?
What happens to the millions of charity-created children starving to death across the globe?
No offense intended, but I do hope this helps to clarify why ANY charity without the appropriate REASON and LOGIC…will not only fail…but is both counter-productive and counter-intuitive…
“I don’t actually believe people are being bred to be stupid.”
I do believe it. But don’t expect to see any measurable change in a short space of time. Selective breeding takes many generations for any effect to show.
“What is happening is that they’re being trained out of the ability to think for themselves.”
And this is also happening, with a much more rapid result. This sort of training only takes a few generations to take hold. I suggest some reading on Sociobiology and the origins of religion.
“I also think poor, weak, sick people should be shown compassion and served by private charities in a voluntary system. I hope you agree.”
Is the hope that the system would be voluntary (in which case not serving the poor, weak and sick is equally acceptable) or is the hope that the weak, poor and sick would be served?
In other words, which is more important, the mechanism or the outcome?
What’s important is the outcome, and the outcome we should want is to avoid harming innocent people and create poverty by broad-based theft in the process of trying to help the poor, weak, and sick. If I steal from one person and help another, part of that outcome is that I have caused harm to someone, quite possibly serious harm. That person might have money problems and the money taken might be the difference between making their mortgage payments for a few months, long enough to lose their home. The mechanism and the outcome are invariably connected.
Agreed that the mechanism and the outcome are associated.
Once you choose liberty as your mechanism, you can no longer make any firm decisions about the outcome anymore. Undoubtedly some people will be voluntarily charitable, and others will choose not to, and some degree of Social Darwinism will be the result. There inevitably exist people who are simply a lot more effort to look after than the return they will ever give back.
Of course a different kind of Darwinism happens under big government: stamping out free thinkers and protesters, pushing people towards obedience, beating up harmless pot smokers, etc. Big government does make a show of looking after the mentally deranged and severely handicapped (some of them do OK, some live rather appalling lives, depending mostly on luck and how corrupt their keepers might be, the public can be comforted by knowing something is being done).
I have a pet cat, and she kills mice, and her killing process is an excellent demonstration of “cruel and inhuman”, regardless that these creatures have done her no wrong. I could lock her in the house and stop this killing, but that would make the cat less than a cat, she would become bored, fat, and probably destructive. Then I would have the problem of killing the mice myself, and I would have to put a lot of time and effort into finding a humane method to achieve this, might as well let the cat do the work. Always some mice will survive. The all had fair chance.
Calling liberty itself a mechanism is a odd and sweeping statement. It’s really more a rejection of some very specific actions that cause harm and leaving open a massively broad array of solutions.