Couple thoughts. One, the present Swedish ideal–what we think of as “Sweden”, even though they have adopted school choice, vouchers, and a system of social security tied directly to the current economy–was enacted early in the 20th century as a direct outcome of Eugenic thought, which looks at human society as amenable to the same sorts of planned interventions as animal husbandry. People could be bred like cattle, desirable traits selected, undesirable traits eliminated (through sterilization, although infanticide was also likely practiced at times), and a better world created through biology. Biology was the supreme science.
Socialism and Eugenics have a common history and a common root. Both look at human beings as, in effect, problems to be managed by superior people. The perfect society, the utopia, is understood to be the inevitable result of putting everything in the hands of the right sorts of people.
And Nazism and what might be termed the Swedish project were kissing cousins. The concept of “racial hygiene” that Hitler preached was already ubiquitous throughout northern Europe in the various universities, perhaps most notable the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Nothing Hitler did was illogical when viewed from the premises which motivated Swedish socialism and social engineering. And to be sure, Sweden was never invaded by the Nazis. They supplied, if memory serves, a lot of raw iron or even steel to the German war machine, and were left unmolested, unlike Denmark and Norway.
And going down the line, Planned Parenthood should be seen clearly as what it is: the last vestige of Eugenic thought present in the modern world. Killing black babies particularly was seen as a form of racial hygiene, of protecting the rest of the world from inferior beings from an inferior race. Racism, to put it another way, is absolutely and inextricably linked with Planned Parenthood, and this holds, I would argue, to this very moment.
Planned Parenthood does not exist to provide advice on how to deliver healthy babies. That is for obstetricians and perhaps gynecologists. It is exist solely to PREVENT births, or what Eugenicists refer to as negative eugenics. Less black babies, less problems: this was the argument, which I am summarizing but not agreeing with.
Watching all this, particularly the Soviet efforts at trying to figure out what in the brains of geniuses made them geniuses (in Lenin’s case, they might also have wondered what made him a psychopath, but of course that was a path to disgrace and murder), I was reminded how often we overvalue the power of intelligence.
The logic of pure brain power leads to, ultimately, as seeing computers as superior to us. After all, they will soon be able to do calculations, to know things, to think ahead, with vastly more power than any of us will ever possess.
I have long meant to post this, but things float into and out of my memory, but Kurt Vonnegut has a passage in Sirens of Titan where he talks about an alien race which decides its robots are better than them, so they commit mass suicide.
But this is really a means of denigrating the spiritual aspect of existence, the way LIFE, and life alone has of participating directly in the cosmos, in the energy swirling around us. It is a life out of balance, a head without a body, a mind without a soul, which of course in many respects is what Communism was and is now.
But I remember this way of thinking. I have often fallen prey to it. After all, I have a reasonably high IQ, somewhere in the top 10% of the top 1%. Being smart, though, is not, in itself, a path to being happy. You need love for that, and you need a heart for love.
Again, I continue to try to make connection with all of my being. It is a long term, difficult task. I have many strange dreams, and feel frequent confusion and lostness. This is the price, though, of coming back to where I belong. This is the price. You always have to pay the price.