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The negative long term societal impact of poor people having children
Some people here may have heard about the short story The Egg by Andy Weir. It's really brief and takes about 2 minutes to read; spoliers below so Caveat lector.
The central premise of The Egg is about a human being ("You", it's written in second person) who just died and is taken to see God. He is told that the whole universe was created specifically as a learning experience for You (who is actually a God in training) and that every single human being is infact a different incarnation of yourself. At the very end God explains to You that "Every time you hurt/helped another you were hurting/helping yourself" with the author's intended moral being something like "therefore you should always help others and be generous etc. etc.".
Naturally being a terminal contrarian I completely disagree. Being someone who wants to minimise the total amount I suffer integrated out to inifinity if I truely knew that I would live eventually every single human life the best thing to do would be to prevent those incarnations of myself most likely to produce progeny who live shitty lives from reproducing in the first place.
Sure, forcibly sterilising people would inflict suffering upon them (and therefore myself) for some small number of years before the reverse hedonic treadmill runs its course, but preventing three kids who were probably going to lead shitty lives were they to be born from existing just saved me two centuries of misery in expectation. This is a trade I'd make again and again until it got to a situation where only well off/intelligent people were allowed to have children for the next generation. By doing this I'd prevent the existance of most of the shitty human lives I'd have lived in the first place, plus the lack of deadweight from these shitty existances needing subsidy from productive humans would mean I could race full steam ahead to grow the economy/research technology without a horde of poors needing to be bribed with gibs so that they don't burn the cities down.
This course of action would basically be the fastest way to create heaven on earth, and when I got to that point I could proliferate an arbitrarily large number of top end humans living in complete bliss (eugenics from controlling who could breed basically filtered out the shitty variants long before this point). Note that the process doesn't require You to be perfectly good at choosing who to sterilize, accidentally sterilizing the wrong people has negative impacts (or even worse, not sterilizing those you should sterilize) but you still get benefits as long as you're dispropotionately sterilizing low value humans.
The story doesn't make You live out your lives in chronological order on earth so basically I could ensure >99.9999% of my time is spent living in one of these complete bliss lives only punctuated by very small amounts of time in a less nice (but still comparatively nicer than if everyone was allowed to have kids, no matter how shitty their lives would have been) existance. All in all it'd be a pretty decent ride, certainly far better than the counterfactual with no forced sterilisation.
I suspect that Weir, who describes his views as "socially liberal" wouldn't quite like this "degenerate" solution to the universe he created. Regardless it remains true that "sterilize shitty people for a better world" is just as valid a moral to take from the story as "help others and be generous".
But this is all just a short story set in a hypothetical universe that doesn't have much to do with our own. However the more I thought about my solution the more I realised it applied to our physical world too, regardless of whether or not we're all secretly one single soul sequentially reincarnating into all the human bodies. For instance right now people on the left complain about "Child Poverty" and how this is a Big Problem That Society Needs To Fix.
The left's preferred solution (like it is often elsewhere) is something like redistribution from those who earn a lot/have wealth to those that don't. This isn't the only solution though, because if e.g. people living below the poverty line all suddenly stopped having kids child poverty would hit 0% very quickly. Not only this but since poors are disproportionately likely to make bad/absent parents this would ensure the average child is more likely to be born into a family situation conducive to good childhood and less likely to lead them into becoming a burden on the state when they grow up.
Of course even suggesting that we should discourage (not even sterilize, merely discourage) poors from having kids is something that makes these very same people on the left quite angry, even though it would go some way towards solving child poverty. Plus the saved money from not needing to subsidise the poors as much could be easily diverted into investment and research, thereby improving humanity as a whole.
Equally people complain about wealth concentration amongst the rich and inequality. Once again if we had a society which encouraged the rich to have children while discouraging the poor we'd get a situation where richer people would on average have larger families and therefore when it came to time for the inheritance to be dished out the wealth of the rich would get diluted while the wealth of the poors would pass on mostly intact.
And of course if rich people had more kids on average compared to poor people we'd get the standard eugenic benefits of the next generation carrying fewer shitty traits on average than the previous one, reverse idiocracy if you will. While the effects of this would be minor on human level timescales when you zoom out to multiple centuries they add up quite quickly.
I've only talked about a few areas here but most modern day western problems can in some way be linked to poor people having kids. We'd all be a lot better off if governments around the world nudged them away from this and instead encouraged the rich to have kids instead. Of course since we live in a fallen world this is basically the opposite of current policy in the UK where if you earn too much your childcare benefits get taken away. Faceplam moment...
Jesus taught us that the poor will always be with us (Matthew 26:11)
So any utopian program to eliminate the poor is doomed to fail, as Jesus always told the truth
NB I am being completely sincere, this is my genuine personal belief
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100 years ago people in most countries, especially the west, were significantly poorer than today. In 1900, 20% of American households had 7 or more children, as of 2020 it's .1%. Those people were far more ignorant and compared to today unbelievably destitute but they marched on and raised civilization to new heights. What would you say changed? If it's the kind of people having so many children, then is poverty the real issue?
The online right talks a lot about genetics as destiny. Putting aside their moral failure to understand if the thing they say is true, and I think it probably is mostly true, it is damnable and must be fixed. I wonder how they square their purview with the most successful, the most attractive, and the most effective people being so uniformly leftist. Alan Ritchson sneeding about Trump stung his Reacher fans for many reasons and I'd think a not trivial one is because 6'3 Aryan chad is attacking them.
Of course the behavior of such people is very easy to explain: going with the flow, kompromat, general evil, apathy, idiocy, but when a discussion starts in such highly reductive territory as "Poor people are clearly the problem, sterilize them" you invite opponents to bring the proportionate reductiveness of something like /r/beholdthemasterrace. It's not a productive discourse. I think there is something to be argued about the impacts of specific policies, one such negative impact of welfare is that certain people dependent on welfare in turn create more people dependent on welfare, and as a great deal of political power is effectively bought from these people, the incentive structure is perverse. But do we blame the impoverished or the exploiting politicians? "Genetics as destiny" wouldn't find blame in sheep, they're sheep.
I think this is also the mistake I see time and again in the political off-by-1 error: if your desired governance has the power to mass sterilize the "genetically undesirable," well surely you've already made abortion and all birth control illegal; abolished welfare and no-fault divorce and so practically ended alimony and child support; revoked the CRA and all of its subsequents; ended the universal franchise; made it generally impossible for women to be educated after high school unless they're becoming nurses; and, I don't know, banned most social media. If casual sex risks pregnancy and there is nothing to stop it and if for many women it would be financially ruinous to have a child if they don't have the father tied down, shouldn't wanton reproduction fall off a cliff?
All that aside, I've written here before how I think hard population control is an inevitability, but I think between us it's for every reason different. It's not healthy to live around more people than names and faces you can remember, the evidence for that piles by the year. Yeah we'll be able to provide for their physical needs, in that Malthus will be forever wrong, but we can't provide for their social needs and a failure to address that will end in total civilizational collapse. Not because of laziness, not some economic issue, just the opposite. Boredom. If tens of millions of young men find no purpose in virtual lives, if they have no real work and not even a prospect for productive labor because AGI is doing all the work the top 10% can't handle, if all they have to do is nothing, they'll get bored, and bored young men have quite the knack for finding a reason to burn everything down.
Yes to everything but the weird aspersion toward women's education. As immortalized by Danny Trejo in Anchorman "times are changing, ladies can do stuff now." Everybody responds to incentives, and if properly aligned, the women who would be happier as careerwomen will go to school and those who would be happier as homemakers will do that.
And, there is also some irreversible amount of seeking your MRS degree from an already-sorted pool of your best peers
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Since when? I searched "left wing people more attractive" and instead the top three results were this:
1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29355104/
2. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/caveman-politics/201803/science-weighs-in-conservatives-look-better
3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/01/10/conservatives-really-are-better-looking-research-says/
And you know it has to be a significant effect if even the more left-wing academic establishment can't help but acknowledge it so strongly.
As for the more/most effective and successful people being leftists... Wouldn't society in that case be, you know, actually genuinely more leftist? Instead of only superficially "leftist" (that is, woke) in the exact ways that serve to attack the White middle class that is the hardest to control and could be the biggest threat to the elite, while absolutely preserving the power of that same highly conservative (in the sense of how they've increasingly become more and more paranoid and reactionary about any protests against their power, no matter how mild, for example J6) military-intelligence-corporate-media elite?
While I do disagree with leftists strongly and think they're basically wrong about everything, I will still give them enough to credit to acknowledge that they are completely correct when they say that true leftism is not woke capitalism wearing its skinsuit, a rainbow-colored Raytheon logo and a few black women put in sinecure positions at Wells Fargo.
That the proponents of [useful idiotism of the decade] (not just wokeism, but in general) got played into providing the most convenient ideology at the time for their masters to maintain a narrative of control does not mean that [useful idiotism of the decade] is the inherent ideology of masters, even for the moment. True masters are flexible and adopt any ideology that suits their advantage at a particular moment, which is why governance design is so important. If it suddenly became more advantageous/unavoidable for the most influential supporters of woke these days to become literal national socialists, at least 90% of them (probably way more) would convert overnight. (This is irrelevant to the question of whether or not they're "true believers" too. They can be that to some degree too and still be willing to betray their truly believed ideology pretty quickly too, because humans are good at rationalization, especially again those flexible master types.)
I should have couched it more: I consider a weakness of BC's argument to be its reductiveness. If 1999 was the peak of human civilization, consider how "poorer" in possessions and quality of life people were in '89; '79; '69; etc. Also consider how families shrunk from each preceding decade. It doesn't take long before you find dozen-kid families in destitute households. Civilization marched on, it got better. We're not looking at the thing itself. Those modern households at question: generally single mothers, generally non-white, or if white, black children, 3/4+ kids--we're seeing social questions in divorces, children out of wedlock, and especially children from multiple fathers, and we're seeing governmental issues in their voting, where to leftist politicians, are described most congruently with reality when called "bought." We're looking at the consequence, or asset or vassal of the thing, when this is the framing. It is reductive, so I presented an opponent's hypothetical reductive response. Yes, as fitness has been labeled by eminently foolish leftist mouthpieces as at best "right-wing" and at worst (to them, they know not what they say) "fascist", physical fitness and "traditional", insofar as it's genetic, beauty standards are being conditioned into the masses as rightist. The right embraces this for obvious reasons, they're being freely given the easiest image W. The Soviets were very interested in fitness so I expect it will be remembered by history as quite the mistake when the American left decided on tolerating and more encouraging fatness as an angle for political power. Short of pathology or actual brain-hacking, there is not enough time or words in the world to make the average guy think of "placeholder excessively overweight woman celebrity" as more attractive than say, Sydney Sweeney.
I'm glad you brought up the question of "leftist" governance. One of the most insidious rhetorical tricks communists pulled (and there are many, as they are typified by such) was the invention of the concept of the "Lib-Left." Leftism is an inherently authoritarian ethos and this is evidenced by a simple looking at history. Since Marx, there has been no leftist political movement anywhere in the world that achieved majority power on the promise and subsequent delivery of a reduction in size of government. Leftism in all circumstances, again when in majority power, invariably strengthens itself. A state that seizes a child to trans them has identical spiritual power to the Soviets seizing Kulak land. In creating "Lib-Left" the trick was cemented with the two-axis political spectrum, thereby allowing leftists to deny any governance as left unless it were economically left, ie avowedly communist. Thus, all governments that failed to achieve communist utopia could be labeled "Auth-Left" and/or "not real communism", or even "Auth-Right", as everyday leftists were free to continue beating their drums in support of the most evil ideology ever conceived by man. We're swiftly approaching the final dissolution of political rhetoric into purely friend/enemy distinction, and I hope just as much that we are swiftly approaching the end of rightist political discourse entertaining the two-axis premise. Or at least until a new two-axis spectrum is likely conceived, but this one without the communist framing. To repeat just to be clear: I reject leftist framing as leftism requiring communist economic policy; leftism is about a powerful state, and the American state is very powerful indeed.
While I agree that leftism tends toward authoritarianism (and that "leftist libertarians" are mostly liars or useful idiots who would immediately be purged after their precious revolution, as seen in basically every leftist revolution in human history), I still disagree that this means that all authoritarianism is leftism. To me authoritarian leftism (at least in the sense of the leaders being genuinely more true believerish in leftism, or at least very credibly willing to signal that) still looks more like Mao Zedong or Stalin than the present American regime (which isn't to say that the present American regime isn't resembling those two more and more lately, but still). Though wokeism is a variety or at least an offshoot of leftism, and though it has infected the present regime to a significant degree and increasingly root and branch, I still feel that it's not quite absolutely embedded or fundamental enough to make leftism the absolute defining context of the present American regime yet (though it is absolutely of course still far more left-wing than right-wing). That is, regime hasn't quite entirely abandoned its military/bureaucracy coup on liberal, small government republic origins enough yet. (This is shown by the fact that it was willing to jettison wokeism in military advertising to try to achieve better recruitment numbers, which it couldn't do if it was its entire legitimacy narrative and raison d'être. You would have never seen the Soviet Union go "Hey we're gonna relax on this whole socialism thing." to try to boost contributions to the Red Army, because in their whole political formula, the army only exists to defend socialism in the first place and without it there's nothing worth protecting.)
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Why? I cannot imagine where you are coming from with this.
Luxury beliefs. Status signaling. Peacocking. This is a well understood phenomenon.
Do you want children, or already have them? If so, do you want them to be more successful than you or less? If there is a particular group you consider a net burden on society, then knowing BC's sterilization isn't going to happen, would you prefer their children eventually rise to be net gains for society or remain a burden?
Among the online right are people who attach a moral value to intelligence, in so doing they necessarily attach moral value to distance from animal urge. It's animal urge that says kill the other, it's the most base desire that pushes sterilization and eradication and it's not one whit different in heart than warring chimpanzees. Virtue makes neighbor of the other, and just as I want my great-grandchildren to be wildly smarter than me, I want the great-grandchildren of all my neighbors to be wildly smarter than me. And yours, and BC's, and everyone here.
Though neither is it virtuous to tolerate criminal and reprobate behavior. Caring for your neighbor can mean knowing what's best for them even when they don't, and that means punishing those who deserve punishment and withdrawing aid beyond bare necessity for those who waste in it. There must be a new inspiration of healthy respect for the just governor and fear of his righteous retribution. There must also be the pursuit of the virtuous solution to these antisocial populations: by changing their children. Not by the chimp's desire to murder them all, not the mythical and well-disproved social policy of uplift by schoolmarm, but in the technological promise of genetic modification.
There's the moral question of the practice, but it's a very low bar: a person who doesn't want their children to have a better life than their own may be disregarded. There's the practical question of whether it would actually work, fair, and of bad actors claiming uplifting therapies as a façade as they in fact modify to make slaves, also fair. If I were not convinced of its safety, I would vehemently oppose it. But in the moral abstract, if we have the ability to make our children healthier and smarter, we absolutely must.
This is what I target with the paragraph beginning "Of course the behavior of such people is very easy to explain . . . " Though I was unfair in it, I should have included "and people who are personally invested in acting in accordance with what they believe is best for all people" though I think that's the minority.
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Not going to get into specifics, but beyond a certain point, the kinds of things you can hypothetically achieve through population selection are things like a reduced crime rate (which can also be achieved through simply imprisoning criminals for doing crimes), and increased quality and quantity of material goods and services (with declining marginal returns - the next 1,000 sqft of house provides less value than the first).
Japan and Singapore are both known for their low rate of crime, high rate of production, and reproductive sterility.
In other words, as the moral price of population selection rises, the theoretical returns decline. Certainty of returns is also reduced, and quite frankly, could you trust e.g. contemporary Canada to run such a program without trying to use it to shut down dissent?
Declining returns, high moral prices, substantial uncertainty, questions about misuse of power... this sort of consideration favors limits on tactics.
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I think your overall thesis is wrong because I don't think that preventing the lower strata from reproducing will actually improve the wellbeing of the next generation.
There has been much talk of "elite overproduction" previously: the proposition that much of the political malaise of the West lately (and, indeed, Ancient China before any of its periodic civil wars) comes from an oversupply of big-brain literati and an undersupply of prestige jobs to keep them from formenting revolution. Put another way: the economy needs Dalits; there must always be sewage janitors working on minimum wage. If the economy doesn't get it's Dalits through Dalit reproduction, it'll get 'em through cramming Brahmins into jobs that they feel are beneath them, which is WORSE for stability and prosperity than just letting the Dalits keep reproducing more Dalits.
We live in Omelas already. We need those miserable children. They cannot be excised from the makeup of society. Improving the objective quality of the lower strata will do nothing to improve their actual life-satisfaction and may even be counterproductive, because it'll not improve their relative economic condition but it WILL make them more resentful about it, and better at throwing pipe bombs at the higher strata.
If anything our best course of action is to Brave New World epsilon semi-moron them to be WORSE.
I would argue that this has become less true throughout the industrial revolution.
In ancient times, almost all of the population had to engage in backbreaking agricultural labor, with most of the surplus going to military aristocrats. Today, even minimum wage jobs typically require literacy and are a lot less back-breaking than working the fields.
You can argue that instead of exploiting our own poor, our wealth is built on exploiting the poor of other countries, but I do not think this is substantially correct either. Of course having countries where labor is cheap which produce electronics or textiles increases the wealth of the Western world, but fundamentally there is more to the success of Western countries than just exploiting the Global South.
The job market for shit jobs has some supply elasticity. If unskilled labor costs next to nothing, automation is often not worth it. On the other hand, if unskilled labor is scarce, then using automation is a great way forward. A wagon driver can probably replace ten porters, and a truck driver can replace plenty of wagon drivers.
In medieval cities, you needed to employ a lot of people to shovel all the shit. You need vastly fewer people to run a modern sewer system. OTOH, the job of sanitation janitor is much more complex than simply shoveling shit. Depending on the supply of labor, I would not be surprised if they made actually more than minimum wage in richer countries.
I’m not 100% sure what ‘sanitation janitor’ means, but CNA’s and hazmat guys both make only a mild wage premium over general unskilled labor. These aren’t careers you brag about- they’re crappy working class jobs. Garbagemen, likewise. Janitors, still not making bank.
Plumbers do, but plumbers are skilled professionals whose jobs are not mostly cleaning.
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"Homemaker" being a central example of such a job (even among the Dalits, humorously). Which is why the Western way to deal with this is through massive amounts of immigration (doesn't hurt that it's also intended to solidify political control in the countries that participate in this, of course, but because the party that doesn't benefit from being the "gibs" party never stops immigration when they are in power, it's obvious there's something else going on).
Of course, for the Brahmins that don't believe that occupation to be beneath them, is that because most of the divide between Dalit and Brahmin is fake (education is a bar so low anyone can pass provided they show up), today's Dalits can reasonably be tomorrow's Brahmins, which will compete with the children of today's Brahmins if nothing else changes. And even for the Brahmins that are smart enough to pass the merit-based education (which cannot be passed simply by showing up), there's no guarantee their children will be similarly inclined/talented, thus making them less likely to pick up the homemaking occupation (parents that care tend to want their kids to have better lives, and they have fewer guarantees than they used to).
And the problem is that, really, there are no good solutions to this problem at present (nor in the past; recall this was Plato's big deal). And even if you do come up with one, any one of the Four Horsemen (or a bad reaction to their shadows) can and will send it spiraling out of control.
You could farm that job out; doing this in a lab intentionally can give you exact control over who ends up in what caste- as a bonus, you can damage the lower castes in such a way that they never figure out that they've been damaged, perhaps through intentionally causing fetal alcohol syndrome as in Brave New World.
Making caste genetic (like India functionally did) solves that problem but creates some others (specifically, moral hazard in the Brahmins; negative effects from X-ism/X-supremacy are mostly caused by that lack of accountability/responsibility) that we don't want to go back to.
Making caste class-based (like Britain has) solves that problem but creates similar moral hazard if not managed properly (it never is, that's a law of nature).
Making caste sex-based (like in Afghanistan) is stable but suboptimal in terms of economic productivity (to the point where having any natural resources around that isn't goats and opium makes this untenable). This is also only stable when women are on the bottom, because (like in Afghanistan pre-US-withdrawl) the enemy can just promise the men better terms and conquer the society without a single shot fired.
Making caste age-based (like in the Western world) only works on the ages that aren't yet capable of realizing it's happening or organizing against it; that usually happens around 18-20, but can vary based on economic opportunity and other factors.
You could manage your economy well by using manufacturing jobs- not as unpleasant and a better utilization of people who are detail-oriented enough, just not driven to actually do something more useful- as a brake on social mobility. But if you do that, you have to be very careful about external factors; if you all of a sudden have a massive wave of migration (horseman: war) you're too incompetent to control (which... is also kind of inherent to being middle class) this finely tuned system will get thrown out of whack, as it has been in Germany (and other European countries, to a point).
Real Communism(tm) was promised as a panacea, but unless you have a leader that's literally goodness itself it's impossible to sustain it [not helped by the means in which it is achieved] (which, interestingly, is exactly what the Christian afterlife promises).
And so on and so forth. Some of this stuff you can fix through
Tower of Babelhigh enough technology, but I have it on good word that the poor we will always have with us.More options
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Or there could be sewage janitors making extremely good wages, sufficiently socially respected for their sacrifice to assuage the struggle of the work.
This has literally never happened. Plumbers, earning good wages to work with their hands, don’t get a lot of social respect- you think the janitors working with their hands at half the skill level are going to be respected and paid well?
The problem is also the solution, in this case: if anyone can do your job in a society where some subsection of people are known to be trash, nobody will give you the time of day. But if everyone is excellent, then even the lowest are worthy of everyone's respect.
I'm not talking about any communist bologna, more like how the medieval meritocracy of denmark has transitioned so that the gal taking your order at McDonalds is beautiful and friendly
Edit for PS: I went to Alaska once for a few days many moons ago and the hotel maid was like a Danish McDonald's worker, blew my mind
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An interesting result of an economy where everyone is equally talented is that the least enjoyable jobs pay the best. People actually have to choose to do those jobs rather than being stuck with them because they're not smart enough to be engineers or whatever.
Even within engineering, the "enjoyable" jobs are known for lower pay and worse work-life balance: most game development houses and places like SpaceX are notoriously bad for this.
They don't want you to know this, but the guy working for a defense contractor filling out TPS reports (or programming in COBOL or whatever) is getting paid a lot, and gets to go home at 5:00 every day.
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I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the conceptual underpinning of child anti-poverty crusades. The idea is that kids are actually very flexible and if given a decent/adequate amount of resources and support, can turn out to be good to excellent in moral, social, and economic areas. Sure, the State isn't the ideal vehicle for this, but it can work passably (especially if in a broader family-support role, IMO, instead of a supplanting one), and it can also from a utilitarian point of view "discover"/empower otherwise underused and underdeveloped diamonds in the rough, so to speak, which can often become a net gain to society. I think history largely bears this out, as generally speaking societies with higher degrees of mobility (which is much easier if there's a decent basic standard of living) perform better and generate more innovation than societies which over-invest in select groups (which virtually never end up being as selective for intelligence and capability as claimed) at the cost of others.
That's laying aside, of course, the moral argument which cannot be ignored: Is having kids a human right? I think living in a society where you can have up to two kids and reasonably provide for them is, if not quite a right, at least something approaching a strong moral goal for society. What about the whole idea of people having equal, intrinsic worth? This requires at least some form of anti-discrimination effort against poor people. And of course I'm not even touching the whole "are people poor because it's out of their control or they made bad choices" axis which is I think too large a topic to touch without everything becoming subsumed into it.
And, of course, there's another, more practical problem: I'd argue eugenics as a movement, which is exactly what you're describing, is almost uniquely predisposed to slippery-slope type problems with abuse, racism, authoritarianism, and other gross excesses. Kind of like how communism sounds great on paper but just doesn't play well enough with human nature. So forgive me for calling out eugenics as being morally disgusting -- even if your particular argument may not be.
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Wild animals live in extreme poverty. They are crappy parents by human standards and give birth to stupid kids.
Perhaps wild nature is in fact a giant suffering engine that should be abolished in its current form.
Perhaps we're all fallen creatures and everything has been getting worse since we were banished from the garden of Eden, even if almost everybody thinks things have actually been getting better (sometimes this belief has been called the Cult of Progress)
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