I am left with the question of why so many people, especially whites, are receptive to ideas and beliefs such as those Hoffman spread about racial inferiority and the nonsense about poor and minorities becoming dependent on aid when it is provided as a temporary or emergency helping hand. I suspect that one has to have a constitutional o…
I am left with the question of why so many people, especially whites, are receptive to ideas and beliefs such as those Hoffman spread about racial inferiority and the nonsense about poor and minorities becoming dependent on aid when it is provided as a temporary or emergency helping hand. I suspect that one has to have a constitutional or elemental tendency toward selfishness, envy, irrationality, mean-spiritedness, or the need to feel superior to buy into these irrational "theories" and sales pitches. There can be no doubt that Hoffman himself and most of the so-called scientists who promoted eugenics as a justification of discrimination and neglect or abuse had a fundamental personal belief system or world-view which was hard, cold, and cynical. How much of this is a consequence of capitalist ideology and the dog-eat-dog mentality of life in the industrial age? How much is the result of wealth justifying its own existence?
My eldest grandson inadvertently gave me a metaphor that I would like to see become a meme. The obscenely wealthy are a dead weight around our neck. (He was actually speaking about another kind of dead weight.) They are the over-indulged, spoiled children who are typically unproductive and anti-social who no longer contribute anything of value to society, if they ever did. Who needs them?
I am left with the question of why so many people, especially whites, are receptive to ideas and beliefs such as those Hoffman spread about racial inferiority and the nonsense about poor and minorities becoming dependent on aid when it is provided as a temporary or emergency helping hand. I suspect that one has to have a constitutional or elemental tendency toward selfishness, envy, irrationality, mean-spiritedness, or the need to feel superior to buy into these irrational "theories" and sales pitches. There can be no doubt that Hoffman himself and most of the so-called scientists who promoted eugenics as a justification of discrimination and neglect or abuse had a fundamental personal belief system or world-view which was hard, cold, and cynical. How much of this is a consequence of capitalist ideology and the dog-eat-dog mentality of life in the industrial age? How much is the result of wealth justifying its own existence?
My eldest grandson inadvertently gave me a metaphor that I would like to see become a meme. The obscenely wealthy are a dead weight around our neck. (He was actually speaking about another kind of dead weight.) They are the over-indulged, spoiled children who are typically unproductive and anti-social who no longer contribute anything of value to society, if they ever did. Who needs them?