Is Chew knew?

Humanity. It craves subjugation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1C6kqXT9XU

Libertarians, they think they're the ubermensch.

Nobody likes being bossed around to much which is why democracy was made to make the people have more power. To a more extreme basis we see communism appear, yet only in theory

Everybody, without some form of governance society would degrade to survival of the fittest, of whom even the strongest would live shorter lives as technology degraded. Next question?

That's precisely what they want.

Putin no. No Putin. Putin no. No Putin.

Post hunter-gatherers....

@jmo: "Everybody, without some form of governance society would degrade to survival of the fittest, of whom even the strongest would live shorter lives as technology degraded. Next question?"

Here's my next question, please note that I'm not opposed to the way things are, this is just theoretically:
Survival of the fittest is about passing on the good genes and filtering out the bad one, right? So if we don't do this survival of the fittest-thing, don't we ruin future generations in a sense?
Humans, like all animals, used to be descendants of many many die-hards who managed to pass on their genes in sometimes very troubling circumstances. Now, 'genetically strong' people die a lot because they're never given a chance in life and 'genetically weak' people live and can often pro-create because they happen to be born in a developed, social country.
With the next generations in mind, wouldn't it be worse for them if we allow the people who can only live off health care to pass on their genes?
Right now it's in many cases 'the system' that decides who lives and who dies, so genetically speaking it's much more random. 'Genetically weak' have a relatively good chance to pass on genes and as such 'genetically strong' have a relatively bad chance to pass on genes.

Is it going to hurt next generations that they have the genes of people who would never have survived if it weren't for 'the system'?

Purely theoretically, in the hypothetical situation that we care quite a bit more about future generations than we do, wouldn't it make sense to adopt policies that give the fittest a better chance at passing on genes? Wouldn't we do future generations a favour in the same sense that preventing global warming and such does?

Again, purely theoretical. I'm in fact the kind of guy that goes through quite some trouble to help the weak so I might be ruining future generations a bit more than most people in that sense.

Are future generations going to suffer by all the weak links that have been and probably will be helped to become part of the chain of evolution over many generations?

Dangerous question perhaps..

'Cause it's gonna be the future soon
And I won't always be this way
When the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away

Holy shit I got a +1 for a well thought-out post with a moderate stance.

Has that ever happened before?

@ steephie: There are problems with a system where you adopt policies aimed at ensuring that only the "best" and "fittest" have children. One problem is that, along the line, people (and policymakers) might decide on policies which favour particular traits as "best" which arise from some bias of their own.

As a *purely* hypothetical example:

"Blond haired, blue eyed white people are the fittest race. No other races should be allowed to breed."

This can be damaging to society.

@Jamie: Still all theoretical and hypothetical:

I'm talking about natural selection. Indeed, regulating that kind of thing is open to corruption and all kinds of things and we've seen that it leads to worldwars and such as well, which is a fine example of what you wouldn't want if you want the good genes to pass on. So I'm not talking about gassing lesser people or anything even slightly like that. what I mean is that while I absolutely support social policies to help those who can't stand on their own feet is a good thing, I'm wondering what this does to future generations.

What I mean to say is that those social policies and inequality between countries combined with social equality within countries means that as a rule of thumb it's not those with the fittest genes that survive, it's those born in the fittest countries.

That's of course a generalisation but I hope you get my point.

So, in your hypothetical scenario, the government would pursue policies of killing people who could not financially support themselves?

I think you're taking it too practically/matter-of-factly. What steephie is saying is that humans, right now, will not continue to advance as a species, rather likely we stagnate or even regress.

Ever see Idiocracy? While I think it's sensationalized, the general trend seems like a possibility.

While the parallel to Nazi ideology was a bit extreme, it was reasonably good. What we are doing is survival of the fittest locally, just like it always was. If anything, we've globalized it. It just happens to be survival in different conditions than we usually observe it. It is a social survival. To a certain extent, the creation of a social safety net with regards to healthcare and food allows more members of a society to survive, making the society more adaptable.

TL;DR
We have turned into societies, and to a greater and greater extent we survive and die as societies, not individuals.

Keep in mind, we must view society, and government, as traits that have probably been selected for. There is good evidence that hominids who didn't join the whole "organization" phase died out, while those that organized into a society with laws and a government to uphold them lived to perfect their society, laws and government.

nah steephie, advocating eugenics is not a moderate stance

Also people misinterpret survival of the fittest all the time, as have you. It's not survival of the strongest or most powerful, but those fittest to their environment. Modern humans transcend this in a few ways

So, back to the OP:

@ tendmote: "What kind of person wants to be "governed"?"

The kind of person who does not want to live in the state of nature.

@Jamie: No, I'm talking about not saving them. Again, I don't support it.

Chaqa got it sort of right except that I'm not going as far as saying that humans as a species wouldn't advance although it's possible.
@phil_a_s: I get that. Does that invalidate the argument though? Does it change something about my hypothesis that we're not passing on the best batch of genes?

@Chairman: I'm asking a genuine question, playing devil's advocate rather than presenting my own opinion. I think I made that pretty clear. I told you I wouldn't support such policies. Not supporting the policies I'm suggesting is as moderate as it gets I would think.

I'm not misinterpreting, I know very well it's about those fittest to their environment, but these days it matters much more where you were born than how fit you are for the 'average' world environment when it comes to your survival. On a genetic level, that's quite suboptimal.

Really, survival of the fittest is a meaningless tautology. It was never supposed to mean the strongest or smartest survive. The point is that those that survive are those who are/were those fitted to survive the best. The fact that they have survived proves that they are also the ones that were best fitted (to their individual circumstances) to survive. Anyone that survives can claim to be a winner of survival of the fittest. The people that get aid from the government, for instance, can claim to be the fittest, because they survived, and they acted in a way that in their conditions helped them to survive. Additionally, we have no idea what genes will be good in the future.

Ignoring the many flaws with the conception of the survival of the fittest, we have two points. One, any society deviates from the 'natural' survival of the fittest - 'those who can't stand on their own two feet' is often something determined by society, with or without government policies. You think a person born into a rich family who only survives because their family pays for expensive treatment noone else could afford embodies the spirit of survival of the fittest better than a person who survives because they are born into a country with free healthcare?

Secondly, is that the most important thing for the survival of man in the future, and the condition of our future society, is the type of society we have. Generally speaking people aren't meaningfully too different, and nurture has a lot of power. Specifically for this conversation, a society that has a 'survival of the fittest' mentality will not progress as much as a society that works with cooperation, and where we help each other, so even if we 'improved' the gene pool, we would weaken the environment it is born into, which would do more harm.

@jamie - an anarchist society is still not the state of nature.

Fair enough. I think the arguments are pretty much on the table now.

Again, I was just playing Devil's Advocate and figuring out what others think.

@ steephie: "No, I'm talking about not saving them"

Deciding not to save them, where you previously *would* have saved them, is not very far away from deciding to kill them. You are deciding to allow them to die, when you could have prevented their death. Removing an existing intervention is still a decision. Making a decision is an action. The action proposed in your example would kill people.

No one wants to be to governed; some want to govern others, but the principal purpose of government is that it is assumed that centralization/monopolization of violence curtails violence more than the reverse, and so people accept the rules of governance in exchange for the reduction in violence.

That's a start, but what about the pooling of resources?

@PE - "centralization/monopolization of violence" into the governments hands doesn't necessaarily reduce violence. It simply changes its source, and perhaps it's "flavor"...but violence is violence.

Taking a large percentage of my paycheck to give to others under the threat of imprisonment is very unwelcomed violence in my book.

@krellin

But wouldn't other types of violence be even more unwelcome? I don't fancy your chances in the Congo with even like a $40 bill in your pocket. You'd end up dead and broke.