When I look at the States today, versus its peers in the rich world, an observation leaps out at me. America’s built a society on a kind of furious, single-minded dedication to one idea: Social Darwinism, or the survival of the “fittest.”
Let’s begin with the obvious. Its economy is modern history’s greatest machine for the survival of the “fittest.” The “winners” deserve extreme fame, fortune, and power — like the billionaires who gained $3.9 trillion during the pandemic while workers lost $3.7 trillion— but the losers don’t even deserve to live. Can’t afford insulin? That’s your fault. You don’t deserve to be alive. Immunocompromised? Not my problem if you get Covid and die because I refuse to wear a mask. You’re just not strong enough. Now, if you’re the average American, perhaps you don’t see the problem with this. “So what?”
The problem is that Social Darwinism cannot build a healthy economy for the very people who believe in it, ever, period, full stop — even though I’d bet most Americans probably still think “survival of the fittest” is the best form of social organization in history.
What does “survival of the fittest” mean? It means that the average is eroded or eliminated, doesn’t it? It means that only the top percentage — whether it’s 20% or 1% — of some population really makes it. But the average person who believes in it so fiercely isn’t in there — he’s at the 45th, maybe 50th percentile, if he’s lucky. LOL. Funny and sad, no? Survival of the fittest comes back to haunt even the average person — the one who has become its staunchest global advocate.
All that is precisely what’s happened in America. The average person now has less than $1000 in savings, a shrinking real income, falling life expectancy, no possibility of retirement, ever. They are going to live a shorter, harder, meaner, dumber, nastier life — than their peers elsewhere, or their grandparents.
The survival of the fittest that Americans champion is working perfectly at destroying them. Social Darwinism is giving “survival” to the “fittest,” those at the very top, let’s say the top 10% — while punishing the very average, at the 50th percentile. The average person who thought, strangely, that being average wouldn’t somehow get him selected out. But that is what “survival of the fittest” does — selects out the average.
(Hence, a middle class collapses in three ways: One, becoming a small part of society. Two, with a falling quantity of life. Three, with a falling quality of life. This approach, survival of the fittest, is annihilating the average person in America, even though that very average person seems to admire and long for it: that is Social Darwinism’s ghastly revenge.
In fact, seeing all but super-rich millennials struggle to afford to have kids and make families, one might even say that Social Darwinism is working perfectly: taking away the reproductive chances of the weakest. But I don’t think we need to be quite so reductive to say it’s a failed way to think about organizing a society).
So. How is American Social Darwinism eliminate annihilating the chances of the average person? Well, because American society is an arena for the survival of the fittest — in contrast with, say, protection of the vulnerable — too. There are no real safety nets, social systems, or public goods — by design — while all America’s peers enjoy these things. Healthcare is tied to a “job,” for example, and only then a dwindling number — because if you are not productive, you do not deserve to live. But even if you are productive, your income is stagnant. This is Social Darwinism tuned perfectly: being productive or efficient is barely enough to hang on, just enough “fitness” to live at the edge of “survival.” So this philosophy has kept America from building the basic systems and goods that the rest of the world’s rising quality of life depends on — healthcare, education, transportation, public media, welfare, and so on.
Why should the average person enjoy any kind of investment? Why should the poor? They’re not fit. So they’re left begging corporations and hedge funds to provide the basics of life — to which they laugh, and charge Americans their futures. Meanwhile, the average person in America doesn’t really cry out for these things, because she still believes in the survival of the fittest, something like a Soviet citizen might have come to believe in the Party — yet all the while the problem is that she is not the fittest. She is at maybe the 50th percentile of fitness — shouting that only those at the very top are fit enough to survive. How funny. How sad.
How is one to prosper, then? Well, who defines “the fittest,” anyways? The fittest do. And so our socio-economic problem soon becomes a cultural problem. Let me put that more clearly. Is “fittest” the top 30%? The top 10%? Who decides? If it’s the top .01%, they will keep “fittest” as small as possible, won’t they? And that’s what has happened in America: once “survival of the fittest” might have meant the top 40% of society — now it’s barely the top 10%. How does that kind of erosion even within Social Darwinism happen?
Everywhere in America, elites tell average that they must bow down to this terrible god of Social Darwinism. It is the only god. It is the best god, who will one day reward them with — what? Flying cars? Immortality? All manner of things are dangled. But the reality is simpler — the average person cannot win these things, by definition, ever, for that is what “survival of the fittest means.”
Still, American elites tell American averages every single day the same thing — in newspaper columns, cable news segments, books, films. Self-help. Prosperity gospels, stock tips, home flips. Reality TV shows about the rich and powerful. Bootstraps, fame, money, glory. “Live your best life!” “You don’t owe anyone anything!” What is the common thread? What is it all really saying? It is just a recapitulation of this basic point, isn’t it?
American culture really says something like this, until people are more or less indoctrinated. “Social Darwinism is the greatest ideology the world has ever known! Have faith! Your reward is coming, too — you too can be one of the fittest!” So The elites parade celebrities and tycoons before Americans, exhorting them: “be more like this!”
The first problem, obviously, is that 90% of people in society aren’t ever going to be the fittest. But here is the problem inside that one. Elites are themselves winners of a contest of survival of the “fittest.” They are telling people what has worked for them — but that is all. They have no incentive whatsoever to look past their own biases and say: “This isn’t working for anyone but us!” Why would they?
Do you see the cultural issue? There is a contest in which the “fitness” one needs to “survive” rises and keeps rising. Once it was maybe 30% of Americans, now it is maybe 10%. Now, the poor average person can hardly be blamed for succumbing to this furious onslaught of Soviet-style propaganda — but he is left a fool: an average person believing in an ideology that says he himself should not survive. And so he isn’t. How funny all this is. How ironic. How tragic, too.
America is discovering the hard way what happens when the average person supports their own self-destruction. Economically, socially, and culturally. Social Darwinism has resulted in America becoming something like the modern world’s grimmest dystopia — a place where kids massacre each other every few days, and no one cares enough to lift a finger to help them. Why is that? Because the endpoint of Social Darwinism brings us to the darkest place of all: it is being a more savage predator than the next person that is the only guarantee of “fitness.”
But a predatory society is barely a society at all. That is why the countries in which it was born, and then utilized — Britain, Germany, Italy — rejected it, and now consider Social Darwinism, a stain upon history.
So. Will Americans ever outgrow Social Darwinism? I doubt it. The forces above are difficult to change. When the average person believes they themselves are nothing but a ritual sacrifice to the gods, dark ages fall.
Umair
January 2022
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