[ExI] What is Grace?

Stefano Vaj stefano.vaj at gmail.com
Tue Mar 10 18:44:50 UTC 2009


On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 6:14 PM, Dagon Gmail <dagonweb at gmail.com> wrote:
> But what happened
> in the last eight years was a series of corporate exploitation programs,
> social darwinist, a  long list of
> war crimes skirting the border of genocide

I do not consider myself by any mean a Social Darwinist, an ideology
that I consider to say the least biologically naive, and even less I
consider myself a neocon, God forbid, so I have no personal axe to
grind here.

But I have to object, for critical reasons, to the mischaracterisation
implied in considering neocons as Social Darwinists.

In fact, Social Darwinism used to be a left-wing doctrine based on the
idea that contemporary societies should be reformed in the sense of
abolishing the various mechanisms protecting privileged, parasitic
classes from social competition and/or from the "struggle for life",
supposedly guaranteeing social improvement through the "success of the
fittest", or at least creating a more equitable "level plain field"
for everybody.

While undeniably this has evolved in the idea that individualist
libertarianism and anarco-capitalism, e.g., of  a Randian bend, would
have some biological arguments in their favour, or in turn would
correspond to some kind of "natural status of things", neocons can
only be described as an ideology obsessed with security and
essentially aimed at *strengthening* the protection of social power of
largely parasitic upper classes against social mobility and social or
international threats, not really at fostering a Hobbesian "war of all
against all", be it even at a purely economic level.

What would this have to do with "Darwinism"? This sounds much more
like the creation and maintenance of a comfortable, albeit fully
artificial, habitat for rich dodos. :-)

-- 
Stefano Vaj



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