I mean, I really hope that I don’t need to explain to any of my followers why “Let’s eugenically breed a race of ubermenschen to solve all of the world’s problems!” is a bad idea, but I’d just like to highlight how this whole thing is premised upon the neoliberal assumption that our principal problem is a lack of geniuses.
The thing is, we’ve got lots of geniuses right now! Even a fair number of rich ones, potentially in positions to make the world better! But the thing is that a lot of them are focused on things like “designing new apps” or “mining crypto-currencies” or “optimizing search algorithms”, because our society heavily, heavily incentivizes those things, while focus on systemic issues is increasingly shunned. And this isn’t because some stupid person somewhere in the woodwork is consciously deciding to make the world work; it is an emergent property of how our economy is structured, and the ideologies that surround it, and my strong intuition is that giving someone more raw intelligence does not, of itself, do anything to make them less susceptible to ideology.
How many “geniuses” did poorly in school because they had food insecurity and went to class hungry? How many geniuses couldn’t afford college? How many geniuses had to work multiple jobs to support their families? How many geniuses in one area had to get a job in a different area? How many geniuses had a brilliant idea or invention that wasn’t funded because it wouldn’t be profitable?
Idk I feel like having social safety nets that people can use to pursue whatever it is they’re good at and or passionate about without having to worry about profit or pay would be much better for geniuses than eugenics
