Technofascism and Materialism Will March Arm-in-Arm

Advances in high technology create a new possibility of oppression: the specter of technofascism. 

A recent article you can read here is entitled "How Epstein Channelled Race Science and ‘Climate Culling’ Into Silicon Valley’s AI Elite." It is based largely on emails very recently released as part of the release of documents of Jeffrey Epstein. The subtitle of the article says, "The Epstein files expose how racial hierarchy, genetic 'optimisation' and even climate-driven population culling circulated inside Big Tech circles." 

Here are some excerpts from the article, which includes references to ideas about "population thinning" or "population culling," apparently ideas that certain groups regarded as "inferior" or "less useful" should be allowed to die, for the sake of improving humanity's genetic stock. The article also references an Edge.org web site and series of books I discuss in my post here.  

"Taken together, the Bach correspondence and the longtermist ideas circulating in this environment show that human hierarchy, population thinning and genetic destiny were not fringe provocations, but part of the ambient intellectual air inside the circles designing the next generation of AI....As previously reported in Byline Supplement, Bostrom would go on to openly advocate in utero selective breeding to enhance population IQ; total global surveillance by artificial intelligence to prevent human extinction; and the idea that sacrificing a billion lives today might be worth it to improve the chances that ten to the fifty-fourth power (septendecillion) people exist in the future.

In 2009, the same year he joined Edge and became a regular contributor to the network, Bostrom co-founded the World Transhumanist Association (now known as Humanity+). Two years later, Jeffrey Epstein donated a total of $120,000 to Bostrom’s organisation....Epstein’s underwriting of Edge gave him extraordinary access and trust with men who were already building the systems – cloud platforms, AI architectures, digital-asset networks – that now underpin political and economic power.

Threaded through that infrastructure was a worldview that Epstein helped architect: the elevation of a self-defined cognitive aristocracy; rising scepticism toward democratic accountability; an obsession with racial and gender hierarchy, and genetic 'optimisation'; machine intelligence as the inevitable future of humanity, if it survives extinction; the legitimacy of population culling to root out inferior groups; all rooted in a hyper-reductionist, technocratic (and arguably unscientific) view of existence as a computer simulation in an amoral multiverse of simulations.

It was a worldview Epstein not merely recognised but was actively cultivating, as it conformed to his own horrific moral choices."

You could use the term "technofascism" to describe such ideas, and you could get quite a lot of justification for the use of that term from the long paper "Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the new authoritarianism" by Mark Coeckelbergh, which you can read here. Coeckelbergh describes quite a few parallels between the activities of some players in Big Tech and the activities of fascism. Here is an excerpt from that article:

"The leaders of Big Tech and their advisors spread ideologies that say that the development of AI will accelerate dramatically: artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence are around the corner and will radically transform society and humanity. Influenced by thinkers such as Bostrom and MacAskill, Big Tech further promotes narratives about the long-term, cosmic future of intelligence. MacAskill (2022) has argued for longtermism: the long-term future takes priority, ethically speaking. This future is imagined as one in which humanity spreads to other planets: trillions of people living with advanced AI. But transhumanists such as Bostrom (2014), Kurzweil (2005), Yudkowsky, and Sanders go further and imagine a vast number of superintelligence beings as mergers of humans and AI. These narratives invite and support the self-regulated development of AI in the hands of Big Tech and puts tech kings such as Musk and Altman (and the thinkers who advise them) in the role of heroes and leaders in a longer term narrative of cosmic proportions: they will lead humanity on the way to the new Brave New Future, in which AI transforms everything. And this has consequences for ordinary mortals such as you and I. We might not matter so much anymore in the light of the New Brave World in the making. Today, we better follow the tech leaders. And in the future, we might well become obsolete. As Torres (2021) has warned, Silicon Valley is influenced by, and spreads, ideologies that are apocalyptic and predict doom: ends times are near and current humans might no longer be needed on the way to a transhumanist and longtermist future, where we will make way to superintelligent entities. Like the ideologies of historical forms of fascism, these tech ideologies spread a death cult and a leadership cult."

You may be baffled by these references to simulation theory and longtermism. I explain how they are related in my post "Longtermism Is Fueled by a Goofy Belief in Computer-Generated Lives," which you can read here. Simulation theory started out as Nick Bostrom's very silly speculation that we may all be merely parts of a simulated reality created by extraterrestrials. It is an enormously stupid idea based on false materialist assumptions.  What is called "longtermism" is a futurist philosophy centered upon speculations that in the future humans will be able to create gigantic numbers of artificial human lives by using computers to artificially generate something like human lives. 

Such ideas are pretty much the worst kind of nonsense, and it is all totally dependent on the false assumptions of materialism. If you believe that a human mind arises solely from a brain, you may believe that there is some way for a computer to recreate a "brain makes mind" mechanism, opening the door to computers creating something like human lives. But if you have done enough study of the endless very strong reasons for rejecting "brains make minds" ideology, reasons discussed at the greatest length in the posts of my blog here, you will reject such a possibility. 

The reasons for rejecting materialism (and the simulation theory and longermism that are based on materialism) are many, including these:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could produce any such things as choices or decisions;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when they had no brain waves, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here);
• the fact that humans have very many types of well-documented experiences that are inexplicable under any claim that the brain is the source of the human mind.  

In the opinion article here, the Émile Torres mentioned above has some pointed criticisms of the thought of Nick Bostrom. Torres says, " Many of the same racist, xenophobic, classist and ableist attitudes that animated 20th-century eugenics are found all over the longtermist literature and community."  Torres also says, "It should be clear at this point why longtermism, with its transhumanist vision of creating a superior new race of 'posthumans,' is eugenics on steroids." 

If technofascism arises to stomp a boot of oppression on our heads, such technofascism will march arm-in-arm with materialism. There was a previous form of fascism that marched arm-and-arm with the materialist ideology of Darwinism: the twisted horror that was Nazism. 

Back in the Nazi days

The famed British medical journal The Lancet created a commission to examine the role of medical professionals in the Holocaust. The commission issued a long report entitled "The Lancet Commission on medicine, Nazism, and the Holocaust: historical evidence, implications for today,teaching for tomorrow." You can read the report here. The report details that medical professionals were some of the key players in the Nazi slaughter of millions. Below is an excerpt from the report:

"The obsession with race and heredity helps to explain why Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess could describe National Socialism as applied biology, and why medicine came to occupy such a significant place in Nazi Germany, which has been described as a biopolitical dictatorship.  Medicine’s role was to purify and strengthen the German national body (Volkskörper) and to prepare it for its historical mission to build an empire that would last a thousand years (a concept borrowed from Christian theology). The creation of a Nazi version of medical ethics was part of this endeavour. A core element of medicine’s role was so-called race hygiene (Rassenhygiene). Developed in the early decades of the 20th century and based on darwinian terms of selection and struggle and Herbert Spencer’s concept of survival of the fittest, race hygiene describes a set of assumptions, ideological beliefs, and practices that were intended to create a strong national body by fostering the procreation of desirable elements and eradicating those considered racially undesirable or genetically unfit. Implementation of race hygiene, which overlapped considerably with the field of eugenics, became the central pillar of public health during the Nazi period."

On the beginning of page 5 of the same commission report, we read about how natural  selection ideas were at the core of eugenics ideology. The Lancet commission report is 73 pages of double-column fine print, detailing in the most explicit detail how the medical and biology authorities of Nazi Germany were enormously complicit in the immense crimes of the Nazis, providing enthusiastic crucial support at every stage. The reported results are of the greatest importance to anyone who has ever doubted mainstream biology claims about unguided evolutionary origins and "brains make minds" tenets, while asking, "Could it really be that the majority of medical and biology authorities in my country might be wrong about an important teaching?" The answer to that question (as demonstrated by the Lancet commission report) is: not only can the leading medical and biology authorities of a nation be wrong in some of their main teachings,  but they can also be enthusiastic co-participants in the most horrible crimes slaughtering millions. 

Totalitarianism uses "ends justify the means" apologetics to try to justify its crimes. Under Nazism people would say that bloody horrors of mass human slaughter were justified because they would help achieve the glorious result of a thousand-year empire. Under Soviet communism, people would say that bloody horrors of mass human slaughter were justified because they would help achieve the glorious result of the worldwide triumph of communism or the establishment of a worker's paradise. Technofascism theorists are now claiming that "population culling" may be justified in order to help achieve the glorious result of a future in which trillions or quadrillions of artificial lives are generated by computer server farms (maybe solar-powered computer server farms floating in space or existing on the moon). 

It's all the craziest kind of nonsense, and once you adequately study brains and minds you may realize why it is simply impossible. Minds like humans have can only arise from top-down causation such as transcendent causation. Nothing in the slow, very noisy, address-free and index-free high-molecular-turnover meat of a brain and nothing in any electronics of a computer can ever give you a thinking, knowing, believing, loving, caring, planning, questioning, seeing, hearing, creating, imagining, willing, speaking, reading, aspiring, instantly learning, instantly recognizing, striving, enjoying, suffering and comprehending unified self like yourself, a person capable of insight, compassion, morality, self-introspection, instant recall, philosophical inquiry, appreciation and spirituality. 

Bostrom-inspired ideas have always hinged on the silliest word trick unworthy of any serious thinker. It's a word trick in which you start out by claiming that computers can simulate lives (referring to reality such as video games in which human actions are simulated). You then leap to the utterly unwarranted claim that human lives can be produced by computers, using the same term "simulation" to refer to such a production, switching the definition of "simulation" without announcing your switch. It's the same type of equivocation sophistry and word trickery nonsense that would be going on if you first referred to the fact that Taylor Swift is a star, and then said that this proves that Taylor Swift can heat our planet if the sun disappears, because stars are huge luminous bodies emitting enormous heat. (In English the word "star" has a double meaning, referring to popular entertainers and also objects like the sun.)

Once we move towards intelligent ideas about how we got here -- by the action of a causal reality enormously greater than ourselves -- we can move beyond the morally toxic "survival of the fittest" ideas of Darwinism, and embrace a moral viewpoint in which each human mind and each human body is to be treasured and respected, a viewpoint in which humans are never regarded as some animals to be culled. 

Free Will Denialism Is the Worst Type of Denialism

Free will denialism is when someone denies that humans have free will. A typical free will denialist claims that you do not have free will, because all of your choices are determined by events in the brain.  Were that true, you might not be responsible for your decisions. 

Free will denialism is morally poisonous, because it tends to weaken or destroy any sense of shame or guilt a person might have. Free will denialism offers an excuse (a kind of “get out of jail free” card) for any evil thing that you might do. If you believe that you have no free will, and that everything you do is completely mandated by the particles and electricity in your brain and the laws of physics, you may kill, maim or rape without feeling any sense of guilt at all. Why feel guilty about your conduct, if your neurons and brain chemicals and brain electricity made you do it? A person should only feel guilty about anything if there is free will.

Thankfully, there is a way to completely undermine the insanity of free will denialism, to make it melt into the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her. We can make the specter of free will denialism melt away in our minds by simply discarding the unwarranted doctrine that the human brain generates the human mind.  Free will denialism is entirely predicated on the dogma that the mind is generated by the brain. But if our minds are not generated by our brains, there is not the slightest reason to doubt our free will. If your mind is some spiritual reality or soul reality or some mental reality that is not generated by my brain, then if you do something evil you can't blame your neurons or some chemical reactions or electricity in your head; you can only blame your self.

The fact that we can defeat the mind poison of free will denialism and preserve a belief in free will is a practical reason for believing that the brain does not make the mind. But such a practical reason is only one of many reasons for believing that minds do not come from brains. They include the following:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could produce any such things as choices or decisions;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when they had no brain waves, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here);
• the fact that humans have very many types of well-documented experiences that are inexplicable under any claim that the brain is the source of the human mind.  

So while there is a practical moral reason for believing that minds do not come from brains, what we may call a reason of convenience, there are many more evidence reasons and logic reasons for thinking such a thing, reasons that hold with equal strength even if we pay no attention to practical consequences.

Do not fall victim to the madness that is free will denialism. You are a person with free will and moral responsibility. Nothing could be more obvious, and the fact that some deny this fact so obvious merely shows that humans can believe the silliest things. If you do some evil thing, you should feel guilt, because it is your self who made the bad decision, not your neurons. 

Avoid arguing with a free will denialist on some tiny little evidence matters he prefers to discuss, such as what exactly went on in some murky little experiment. Instead, turn the argument into a larger discussion of whether it makes sense to believe that brains produce minds. Learn well the facts and reasons for rejecting "brains make minds" dogma, and you will have the best defense against the cancer of free will denialism. 

Holocaust denialism is stupid, but not a tenth as stupid as free will denialism. The Holocaust denier claims that the Nazis were not so guilty, while the free will denialist would have us believe that the Nazis were not guilty at all, on the grounds that they were controlled by their brain chemistry.  

Sowing the seeds of immorality and wickedness, free will denialists lie like crazy. A careful study of their claims will help reveal the lies they so often tell. Free will denialists tell lies like those I list in my post here. I recently read a well-known scientist who revealed himself to be a free will denialist. I have followed the person's writings for years, and I know him to be a frequent liar. You should never be the least bit surprised to learn that a free will denialist is lying, and you should not be surprised if you learn such a  person committed some very bad crime.  We should expect that a person who believes that someone is not to blame for his actions will tend to act in ways that are shameful, whenever he thinks he can get away with such actions. 

Free will denialism is the nadir we might expect from materialism, which has always been a program aiming to dehumanize and depersonalize humans, to try to make humans sound like something more easily explicable as some accident of nature. 

Bad teachers

Toxic Effects of the "Universal Acid" They Want Us All to Swallow

 Darwinist materialism helped pave the way for bloodshed, cruelty and oppression in a variety of ways:

(1) Creating the myth that human origins had been scientifically explained, Darwinism helped paved the way for totalitarian atheism, which in Russia, China, North Korea and Cambodia proved to be history's most enormous engine of mass murder and oppression, cropping up tens of millions of dead bodies at the hands of people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, along with millions of others who were put in the living hell of places such as the Soviet gulag prison camps. For example, in the wikipedia.org article “Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union,” we read, “The total number of Christian victims under the Soviet regime has been estimated to range between 12-20 million.” We read details such as these:

•  “In the years 1917–1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested; 95,000 were put to death, executed by firing squad.” 
• "During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot."

Similarly, a CIA document refers to attacks by the Red Guard in Maoist China that "spared no religious group in China." On the page here we read of some of the unspeakable persecutions Communist officials used on religious students (seminarians). 

(2) Creating the very absurd myth that humans did not fundamentally differ from animals, a ludicrous claim taught by Darwin himself, Darwinism paved the way for people to slaughter their fellow men while thinking they were doing something not much worse than killing animals. 

(3) Centered around phrases such as "struggle for existence," "the preservation of favored races," and "survival of the fittest," Darwinism provided an ideological underpinning for systems such as Hitlerism, Leninism and Maoism that were based on the cruelest exploitation and oppression of the weak by the strong. 

All of this was so unnecessary, because a proper analysis of biology would have centered upon things such as cooperation and harmony and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence, which are all necessary in mountainous amounts for organisms and ecosystems to exist. A careful study of such things will tend to lead you in the opposite direction of some emphasis on a brutal "struggle for existence," and also lead you away from all boasts of understanding how we got such marvels. But rather than studying the gigantic levels of cooperation and harmony and coordination and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence within nature, which were things defying his boasts, Darwin shunned a study of such key facets of nature, focusing on only things that fitted in with his explanatory boasts. 

The effects of Darwinism on human history have been extremely pernicious. Darwinism continues to be a comfort for racists trying to justify their erroneous claims. I have noticed a tendency for racism promotion at a major Darwinism-friendly science news site, which I will document in a future post. The continued popularity of  Darwinism in academia (despite the disastrous moral effects of Darwinism) is not so surprising when we consider that Marxism was popular in pockets of US academia during the late 1960's, at a time when the worst bloody excesses of the Maoist Cultural Revolution were occurring, and decades after millions had needlessly died under the hands of Marxist regimes such as Stalin's. A small fraction of professors in sociology and economics continues to support Marxism. It is sometimes joked that Marxism is dead everywhere in the world except in academia.

On the page here of The Black Book of Communism, we read this estimate of state-caused deaths in communist countries:

U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths

China: 65 million deaths

Vietnam: I million deaths

North Korea: 2 million deaths

Cambodia: 1 million deaths

Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths

Africa: 1.7 million deaths

Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths

Some of the larger numbers above are highly uncertain. 

Last month a news article informed us that a senior biology researcher at Charles Darwin University in Australia has been sentenced to ten years in prison for heinous crimes.  We read this:

"Adam Robert Corden Britton was sentenced in Darwin Supreme Court on Thursday having pleaded guilty to 56 offences related to the torture and sexual exploitation of more than 42 dogs on his rural property. The 53-year-old, who was born in West Yorkshire and earned a PhD in zoology from Bristol University before emigrating to Australia, was sentenced to 10 years and five months with a non-parole period of six years, backdated to his April 2022 arrest."

We read of horrid crimes involving many acts of dog rape and dog torture occurring over many years,  and that "Britton was also sentenced for possessing and transmitting 'the worst category' of child sexual abuse material."  Some are complaining that he got off with too light a sentence. The dog rapist filmed his crimes so that others could watch his abuses. 

Why should we not be surprised to read about such a thing? It is because biologists are trained in a system of belief that does nothing to encourage morality, and does very much to corrode the possible underpinnings of morality.  Darwinism cheerleader Daniel Dennett  loved to say that Darwinism was a "universal acid." This much seems clear: Darwinist materialism often acts as an acid to dissolve away the foundations of morality. A wikipedia.org article on the the infamous Columbine school massacre tells us this about one of the two mass murderer shooters:  "On the day of the massacre, Harris wore a white T-shirt with the words 'Natural selection' printed in black." A wikipedia.org article tells us that the gunman in the worst mass shooting in US history (the 2017 Las Vegas massacre that killed 60 and gun-wounded 413) was an atheist, according to his girlfriend. Then in this decade there are one or two leaders each behind the slaughter of 30,000 or more innocents, both seeming like a materialist occasionally referring to religion merely to score political points.  

We should never be surprised to learn about wicked deeds by people who teach or believe falsehoods and lies like the falsehoods and lies mentioned below. In particular, any person who denies the existence of free will is a person you should expect to act in immoral ways. Such a person will think that he is not to blame for any crimes he commits, on the grounds that his neurons made him do it. 

Don't expect morality from bad teachers like these

 

It is good for a person to study things such as (1) the psychic phenomena and brain physical shortfalls that support the idea that all humans are souls rather than mere animals; (2) the fine-tuned laws and fundamental constants of the universe that lead us to suspect that we exist by the grace and wisdom of a transcendent reality providing the most concrete basis of immutable moral principles;  (3) the gigantic degree of cooperation and harmony and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence  within the bodies of humans and all other mammals; (4) the gigantic failure of biologists to credibly explain such biology marvels and the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body, a shortfall leading to the idea that the vast physical organization of all mammals must result (directly or indirectly) from some transcendent purposeful agency.  Such studies may inspire in that person a beneficial ethics in which respect for all humans and mammals is encouraged, and harmony and the cooperative teamwork of very diverse agents is emphasized and prized, an ethic that is the opposite of the cruel and morally corrosive  "survival of the fittest" ideology, which reaches its most toxic nadir in the poisonous delusion of free will denialism.  

In Ethics, Ridiculed Spirit Theorists Often Outshone the Stars of Darwinism

 In the 19th century Spiritualism arose in 1848 and the following years, almost exclusively in places where slavery had been abolished. Almost all of the reported spiritual manifestations in the United States between 1848 and 1861 (the start of the American Civil War) were in the US states where slavery had been abolished, such as New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.  Spiritualism spread from the US to England after slavery had been abolished in the British Empire (which happened in 1834).  It should therefore come as no surprise that when examining the early Spiritualist literature, we find some strong denunciations of slavery. 

For example, on pages 236 to 239 of his 1851 book on spiritualism, Joel Tiffany gives a ringing denunciation of slavery.  Referring to three million slaves in the US, he states this:

"Here are among us, three millions of men, women and children made chattle by the laws and public sentiment of this christian nation. Three millions of immortal beings, whose business here it is, to individualize and develop immortal spirits ; whose birth-right it is, to investigate, study, improve, and develop those minds preparatory to the eternal future, upon which they are about to enter ; shut out by the laws of the land, from the rights and immunities of manhood ; denied the privilege of learning to read the volumes of nature or revelation ; shut out from the reach of human sympathy; proscribed and hunted like boasts through the land ; denied the rights of being husbands to their wives, or wives to their husbands ; parents to their children, or children to their parents... Three millions of human beings doomed to perpetual servitude and bondage, and made the victims of avarice and lust. And it is made a penal offence to give them food, raiment or shelter, even when they are ready to perish. By the laws of these christian states, the husband can be torn from the wife and be doomed to perpetual bondage, and she to ceaseless concubinage ; the baby may be plundered from the cradle, or torn from the breast of its mother, and sold in the public shambles. The family circle may be invaded, and all the ties of natural affection broken, crouched and trampled upon; and all that avarice can exact, caprice and villany can inflict, or lust can crave, these three millions are subject to, and there is no arm to protect them ; there is no city of refuge within this christian nation to which they can flee, and no christian altar to whose horns they can cling, und demand protection....It cannot be denied that the Christianity of the United States holds the institution of slavery in its power, and can put an end to it at pleasure, if it were disposed to do so. And the only reason why that most accursed of all institutions, still continues among us, is because the religion of the country wills it."

To give another example, in an 1855 book a leading figure of American spiritualism  (Adin Ballou) states this:

"Slavery, and all kinds of tyranny and oppression are utterly sinful. So all war, violence, revenge, and vindictive punishment."

I was shocked recently to see a diagram depicting the worst murderers in history. On the right of the diagram (listed as history's worst murderers) were Hitler, Stalin and Mao, which did not surprise me. But I was quite surprised to see the man listed as the fourth worst murderer in history: King Leopold II of Belgium. I knew nothing about such a person. Researching the topic, I learned about one of history's most horrible tales of human oppression. 

In the late nineteenth century,  European nations were rushing to exploit the riches of Africa. The worst offender, it seems, was Belgium. King Leopold II set up a nation he called the Congo Free State, which he regarded as his own personal property, to be ruthlessly exploited for raw materials such as rubber. Because of his ruthless exploitation of this state, a huge number of Africans died, a number estimated between 1 million and 15 million. It is impossible to accurately estimate the number, because no one was keeping track of all those who died from the oppression. 

The ruthless subjugation and exploitation of the Congo is documented in the 1909 work The Crime of the Congo by the noted author Arthur Conan Doyle. While almost all of America and Europe stood mute during decades of the most horrible abuses in the Congo, Doyle stuck his neck out and wrote a full book denouncing the oppression. In his first paragraph Doyle writes this:

"There are many of us in England who consider the crime which has been wrought in the Congo lands by King Leopold of Belgium and his followers to be the greatest which has ever been known in human annals. Personally I am strongly of that opinion. There have been great expropriations like that of the Normans in England or of the English in Ireland. There have been massacres of populations like that of the South Americans by the Spaniards or of subject nations by the Turks. But never before has there been such a mixture of wholesale expropriation and wholesale massacre all done under an odious guise of philanthropy and with the lowest commercial motives as a reason. It is this sordid cause and the unctious hypocrisy which makes this crime unparalleled in its horror."

After noting that the United States was the first nation to recognize this Congo Free State set up King Leopold II of Belgium, Doyle describes on pages 11-12 how ruthless exploitation began:

"Having obtained possession of the land and its products, the next step was to obtain labour by which these products could be safely garnered. The first definite move in this direction was taken in the year 1888, when, with that odious hypocrisy which has been the last touch in so many of these transactions, an Act was produced which was described in the Bulletin Officiel as being for the 'Special protection of the black.' ....This Act had a very different end. It allowed blacks to be bound over in terms of seven years' service to their masters in a manner which was in truth indistinguishable from slavery. As the negotiations were usually carried on with the capita, or headman, the unfortunate servant was transferred with small profit to himself, and little knowledge of the conditions of his servitude...In that case the negotiations run their course easily enough; each chief promises to supply a certain number of slaves, and receives presents in return. It may happen, however, that one or another pays no heed to the friendly invitation, in which case war is declared, his villages are burned down, perhaps some of his people are shot, and his stores or gardens are plundered. In this way the wild king is soon tamed, and he sues for peace, which, of course, is granted on condition of his supplying double the number of slaves."

On page 22 Doyle describes some of the economic enslavement involved:

"Having claimed, as I have shown, the whole of the land, and therefore the whole of its products, the State — that is, the King — proceeded to construct a system by which these products could be gathered most rapidly and at least cost. The essence of this system was that the people who had been dispossessed (ironically called 'citizens') were to be forced to gather, for the profit of the State, those very products which had been taken from them. This was to be effected by two means; the one, taxation, by which an arbitrary amount, ever growing larger until it consumed almost their whole lives in the gathering, should be claimed for nothing. The other, so-called barter by which the natives were paid for the stuff exactly what the State chose to give, and in the form the State chose to give it, there being no competition allowed from any other purchaser. This remuneration, ridiculous in value, took the most absurd shape, the natives being compelled to take it, whatever the amount, and however little they might desire it. Consul Thesiger, in 1908, describing their so-called barter, says: 'The goods he proceeds to distribute, giving a hat to one man, or an iron hoe-head to another, and so on. Each recipient is then at the end of a month responsible for so many balls of rubber. No choice of the objects is given, no refusal is allowed.' "

Later we read of more details of the exploitation:

"By this system some two thousand white agents were scattered over the Free State to collect the produce...Each agent was given control over a certain number of savages, drawn from the wild tribes, but armed with firearms. One or more of these was placed in each village to ensure that the villagers should do their task. These are the men who are called 'capitas,' or head-men in the accounts, and who are the actual, though not the moral, perpetrators of so many horrible deeds. Imagine the nightmare which lay upon each village while this barbarian squatted in the midst of it. Day or night they could never get away from him. He called for palm wine. He called for women. He beat them, mutilated them, and shot them down at his pleasure. He enforced public incest in order to amuse himself by the sight....Then came the punitive expedition, and the destruction of the whole community. The more terror the capita inspired, the more useful he was, the more eagerly the villagers obeyed him, and the more rubber yielded its commission to the agent. When the amount fell off, then the capita was himself made to feel some of those physical pains which he had inflicted upon others. Often the white agent far exceeded in cruelty the barbarian who carried out his commissions. Often, too, the white man pushed the black aside, and acted himself as torturer and executioner. As a rule, however, the relationship was as I have stated, the outrages being actually committed by the capitas, but with the approval of, and often in the presence of, their white employers."

On page 33 we read one of very many similar accounts in the book:

"It was not merely for rubber that these horrors were done. Much of the country is unsuited to rubber, and in those parts there were other imposts which were collected with equal brutality. One village had to send food and was remiss one day in supplying it: 'The people were quietly sleeping in their beds when they heard a shot fired, and ran out to see what was the matter. Finding the soldiers had surrounded the town, their only thought was escape. As they raced out of their homes, men, women and children, they were ruthlessly shot down. Their town was utterly destroyed, and is a ruin to this day. The only reason for this fight was that the people had failed to bring Kwanga (food) to the State upon that one day.'  "

The same page quotes a Mr. Murphy:

"The rubber question is accountable for most of the horrors perpetrated in the Congo. It has reduced the people to a state of utter despair. Each town in the district is forced to bring a certain quantity to the headquarters of the Commissary every Sunday. It is collected by force; the soldiers drive the people into the bush; if they will not go they are shot down, their left hands being cut off and taken as trophies to the Commissary. The soldiers do not care whom they shoot down, and they most often shoot poor, helpless women and harmless children."

On another page Doyle quotes a witness of the atrocities inflicted on those resisting slave-like work as rubber gatherers:

"They refuse to bring the rubber. Then war is declared. The soldiers are sent in different directions. The people in the towns are attacked, and when they are running away into the forest, and try to hide themselves, and save their lives, they are found out by the soldiers. Then their gardens of rice are destroyed, and their supplies taken. Their plantains are cut down while they are young and not in fruit, and often their huts are burned, and, of course, everything of value is taken. Within my own knowledge forty-five villages were altogether burned down."

There was no moral difference here between the slavery of the American south (in which blacks were forced to work all day gathering cotton under penalty of death) and the slavery-in-all-but-name of the so-called Congo Free State in which blacks were forced to work all day gathering rubber under penalty of death. The abuses listed in Doyle's book were as bad as any occurring in the American south. On page 52 we read the report of one witness:

"I heard from the white men and some of the soldiers some most gruesome stories. The former white man (I feel ashamed of my colour every time I think of him) would stand at the door of the store to receive the rubber from the poor trembling wretches, who after, in some cases, weeks of privation in the forest, had ventured in with what they had been able to collect. A man bringing rather under the proper amount, the white man flies into a rage, and seizing a rifle from one of the guards, shoots him dead on the spot. Very rarely did rubber come in but one or more were shot in that way at the door of the store — 'to make the survivors bring more next time.'... The white man himself told me that you could walk on for five days in one direction, and not see a single village or a single human being. And this where formerly there was a big tribe! "

On and on the book goes documenting the atrocities, with Doyle stating on page 86 that "The greatest, deepest, most wide-reaching crime of which there is any record, has been reserved for these latter years." But where were our biologists at the time this holocaust was occurring? Some of them (including leading names of Darwinism) were busy creating the type of intellectual environment in which such atrocities would be tolerated. 

There were, for example, the people who caused the kidnapped Congo native Ota Benga to be displayed around 1906 caged with monkeys in the Bronx Zoo, displayed as a claimed example of a "missing link" between apes and men. The wikipedia.org article on Benga incorrectly states that the exhibit was presented "as a lampoon on Darwinism." In fact, the exhibit was designed to promote Darwinism by trying to display evidence that some missing link had been found between apes and men.  A Guardian article tells us that "New York’s newspapers, scientists, public officials, and ordinary citizens revelled in the spectacle," which seemed to attract more than 100,000 visitors. A BBC.com article discusses some of the subsequent attempts to cover up this embarrassing episode. The Guardian article tells us that the caged display of Ota Benga was supported by two major Darwinists:

"Unrepentant, [William T.] Hornaday declared that the show would go on just as the sign said, 'each afternoon during September' or until he was ordered to stop it by the Zoological Society. But Hornaday was not some rogue operator. As the nation’s foremost zoologist – and a close acquaintance of President Theodore Roosevelt – Hornaday had the full backing of two of the most influential members of the Zoological Society, both prominent figures in the city’s establishment. The first, Henry Fairfield Osborn, had played a lead role in the founding of the zoo and was one of the era’s most noted paleontologists. (He would later achieve fame for naming Tyrannosaurus rex.)" 

Henry Fairfield Osborn was a fervent Darwin devotee (as you can tell from reading these two pages) and eugenics advocate who co-founded the American Eugenics Society in 1922.  The Wikipedia.org article on him states this:

"Osborn therefore supported eugenics to preserve 'good' racial stock. Due to this, he endorsed Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, writing both the second and fourth prefaces of the book, which argued for such views. The book was also largely influential on Adolf Hitler. Hitler called the book 'his bible' for it advocated a rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who, according to the writer's opinion are to be seen as 'weak' or 'unfit.' "

A scholar puts it this way:

"The teaching of Darwin in a sense sanctified the exploitation of the less fit by the better fit -- that is, exploitation of those less able to adapt to the circumstances and opportunities of the times. The industrial revolution that was shaping itself in the Victorian age saw the enterprising, but also the unscrupulous, take advantage of the underprivileged, the resourceless, the ignorant, the unprotected -- in a word, the unfit. The exploitation manifested itself in work hours from before dawn until the night, in child labor paid pittances, in unhygienic factories and perilous mines." 

The scholar was referring to the exploitation of workers in England during the Victorian age, but the words apply all the more forcefully to the situation in the so-called Congo Free State established in 1885, soon after Darwinism started to gain traction. There seemed to be scarcely a word of protest from Darwinists against the genocide occurring in that state between 1885 and 1909, while Leopold II of Belgium was its effective dictator. 

In a book William T. Hornaday (referred to above) taught both the untrue racist idea that there was a "vast" difference between the intellect of human races, and also the very absurd claim that "the gap between the gibbons and the monkeys is much greater than that between the gorilla and man." It was the old deceptive Darwinist strategy of trying to make the oceanic gulf between apes and humans look like a small crack. 

The information overlords controlling today's mainstream information try to depict Arthur Conan Doyle as a fool, because he was a proponent of spiritualism. They love to cite how Doyle was fooled by two clever sisters who cut out some magazine artwork and made some fake photos that Doyle was fooled by.  But we never hear in discussions of Doyle how he was the one writing a book denouncing one of history's  worst holocausts, while the mainstream authorities of the US and England turned a blind eye to such atrocities that persisted for decades, with some of them helping to create an intellectual environment in which such atrocities would be more likely to be tolerated under Darwinist grounds of "survival of the fittest." 

The Poisonous Effects of the "Struggle for Life" Ideology

When there first appeared Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," the book was greeted by many almost if it was manna from heaven.  A scholar (Velikovsky) noted the following:

"One wonders at the avidity displayed by scientists in the acceptance of the Darwinian theory....It was not brought up against him that he had no academic position in a university, or that his own scholastic degree was that of a bachelor of theology, or that he omitted all footnotes to his sources, or that it was often impossible for a reader to check the data...Darwin became the supreme authority, the symbol of resolution of all questions, and a substitute for the Creator himself."

At that time there was something which was like a gigantic springboard ready to launch some theory of natural biological origins that might have been proposed, ensuring its cultural success. That springboard was the social structure of academia. Just as the social structure of medieval churches served as a huge springboard that helped many a legend go viral (such as legends of the healing powers of saint bones), the social structure of universities and colleges stood ready to make a natural theory of biological origins go viral. Once an idea starts being spread about by the professors at ten or twenty top universities, the idea has a good chance of eventually infecting the masses, even if the idea is very poorly substantiated. Once a bandwagon effect gets rolling to spread some idea in a process of social contagion, and an academia herd effect comes into play, some flimsy claim can become a societal norm, a speech custom that all compliant students are expected to mouth.  

Within the halls of academia there existed a large group of people extremely eager to popularize some theory of natural biological origins as soon as it appeared. We may call these people the yearning-to-say-we-got-this guys. “We got this” is a phrase people say when they think they have something under control or when they think they understand some thing. The yearning-to-say-we-got-this guys included people in academia who hungered for some theory of natural biological origins which would feather their caps and enhance their prestige: a set of professors yearning to crown themselves with glory by positioning themselves as sages who understood the great secret of biological origins. 

Of course, if you are a professor of biology or a professor of natural history, you will seem like a vastly more impressive person if you can convince people that you understand the deep mystery of the origin of species and the origin of humanity. Some professor saying "I understand how mankind originated" sounds like a far more impressive figure than some professor humbly saying, "Such a mystery is a hundred miles over my head." The yearning-to-say-we-got-this guys also included many inside and outside of academia who desired some theory of accidental origins that would fit in with their belief in the nonexistence of any power greater than man.  In the nineteenth century atheists wanted a theory of natural biological origins more than a young boy wants a Playstation or Xbox machine under his Christmas tree. 

So we can begin explaining how Darwinism got to be so popular by mentioning the two groups of people that were most eager for a theory such as Darwin's: professors (particularly biology professors) and atheists. But there were other groups that flocked to Darwinism: oppressive capitalists and oppressive imperialists. To such people Darwinism was like a big Christmas gift: an ideology that would give a green light or a "thumbs up" to their cruel and oppressive behavior. 

Darwin said that the basis of all biology was a "struggle for existence" or "struggle for life" in which "survival of the fittest" was the key principle. Darwin used the very term "struggle for life" in the title of his book "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," also making use of the racist-sounding phrase "preservation of favoured races." Two large groups of people greatly welcomed such ideas:

(1) Capitalist business men running Victorian Era factories, workhouses and sweatshops that ruthlessly overworked workers, and often worked children to their deaths.  The Victorian Era (1837 - 1901) was famous for its brutal exploitation of workers. 

(2) Anyone at all building an international empire such as the British Empire, an empire built upon the ruthless exploitation and domination of people all over the globe. 

Velikovsky puts it this way:

"The teaching of Darwin in a sense sanctified the exploitation of the less fit by the better fit -- that is, exploitation of those less able to adapt to the circumstances and opportunities of the times. The industrial revolution that was shaping itself in the Victorian age saw the enterprising, but also the unscrupulous, take advantage of the underprivileged, the resourceless, the ignorant, the unprotected -- in a word, the unfit. The exploitation manifested itself in work hours from before dawn until the night, in child labor paid pittances, in unhygienic factories and perilous mines." 

The map below shows the British Empire at its height in 1920.  Of course, global empires are not built by gentle means. Global empires are built through the oppression and exploitation of local peoples. Darwinism provided a green light to the oppression that built the British Empire. All cruelties and oppression could be justified with slogans such as "survival of the fittest" and "struggle for existence."

Using the term "enslaved" in a rather loose way, to mean oppression something less than literal enslavement, Velikovsky put it this way, referring to the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901):

"The British Islands, having lost the American colonies at the end of the former century, now, under Victoria, were expanding to become the dominant colonial power in the world. The blacks of Africa, the dark-skinned peoples of the lands bordering the Indian Ocean and various other colors were enslaved as colonial people -- and though the colonial expansion of the British goes back to the sixteenth century, it never reached the scope, the glamour and the degree of extortion that it did in the days of Victoria." 

The ideology of Darwinism aided and abetted this oppression. One of Darwin's main works was The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. That book had some shockingly racist passages in it. One of them was the passage below:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

This racist passage predicts that the “savage races” (meaning humans such as blacks and Africans) will in the future all be exterminated. It is also a passage seeming to suggest that blacks or Australian aborigines are closer to gorillas than Caucasians are.  Although it does not specifically advocate a program of racial extermination, such a passage can be called exterminationist-friendly.  The British imperialists oppressing Africans in East Africa and aborigines in Australia no doubt took solace in passages such as the one above, which rather seemed to give them a "green light" to proceed as cruelly as they wished.  American imperialists also took comfort from Darwinist ideas, using them to justify their oppression in places such as the Philippines. 

A book by another scholar states this, referring to the passage by Darwin quoted above:

"The use of natural selection as a vindication of militarism or

imperialism was nothing new in European or American thought. Imperialists, calling upon Darwinism in defense of the subjugation of weaker races, could point to The Origin of Species, which had referred in its sub-title to The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life...Had not Darwin himself written quite complacently, in The Descent of Man, of the likelihood that backward races would disappear before the advance of higher civilization?" 

The same scholar gives us this quote:

" 'The greatest authority of all the advocates of war is Darwin,' explained Max Nordau in the North American Review in 1889...'They can cover their natural barbarism with the name of Darwin and proclaim the sanguinary [bloodthirsty] instincts of their inmost hearts as the last word of science.' "

Later the same scholar writes this:

"Darwinism and the imperial urge were bound to be fused. If Darwinism was not the primary source of the belligerent ideology and dogmatic racism of the late nineteenth century, it did at least put a new instrument into the hands of the theorists of race and struggle."

Velikovsky remarks below on how Darwinian ideas helped plant the seeds of Hitlerism:

"The doctrine of the fit, whom natural law expects, almost obliges, to live off the unfit, developed in its next phase into Nietzsche's teaching of the Superman to whom all is permitted. And the basis for the Hitlerian philosophy in the following generation was prepared: out of 'fit' and then 'Superman' emerged the concept of a master race." 

Referring to the fifty years before World War I, a book tells us "Darwinism became a kind of popular philosophy in Germany more than in any other country, even England." A book notes the following about Ernst Haeckel, a German writer who had a best-seller book ("The Riddle of the Universe") first published in 1899 and selling half a million copies by 1933: 

"Haeckel saw in Darwin's theory the chance to provide a unified theory of physical, biological and psychological phenomena...Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of his philosophy was the duty of self-preservation and self-assertion according to the natural law of struggle for life. That there are clear differences between the existing human races is a point emphasized by Haeckel...At another level, the idea of spreading the German Lebensraum, or vital space, was essential; the idea of an expansion to the East was essential. It is obvious that the National Socialist bio-policy...was well inaugarated by Haeckel, and indeed followed my many others. In this sense, Hitler 'did not invent national socialist bio-policy' (Stein 1988:51), but took it from the Haeckels and converted it into a down to earth treatise as Mein Kampf should be perceived. "

A search for references to Darwin in Haeckel's "The Riddle of the Universe" shows 47 occurrences, many of them worshipful. On pages 220 to 221 of this book Haeckel gives the atheistic-Darwinist reasoning under which Darwinism was used to justify a "might makes right" degenerate morality. Sounding like he was planting the seeds of Hitlerism, the fervent Darwin devotee Haeckel stated this:

"Darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown us in the struggle for life the powerful natural force which has exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for millions of years. It may be said that the struggle for life is the  'survival of the fittest' or the 'victory of the best'  ; that is only correct when we regard the strongest as the best (in a moral sense)....Do we find a different state of things in the history of peoples, which man, in his anthropocentric presumption, loves to call 'the history of the world '? Do we find in every phase of it a lofty moral principle or a wise ruler, guiding the destinies of nations? There can be but one answer in the present advanced stage of natural and human history : No. The fate of those branches of the human family, those nations and races which have struggled for existence and progress for thousands of years, is determined by the same 'eternal laws of iron' as the history of the whole organic world which has peopled the earth for millions of years."

A major popularizer of Darwinism was the philosopher Herbert Spencer, whose works were very popular in the nineteenth century, but are read by almost no one today. A book states this about Spencer:

"Spencer was a firm opponent of welfare, relief or any kind of state aid to the poor of the sick. Such measures, he claimed, simply increased the number of 'unfit' individuals and interfered with social evolution."

Spencer probably was inspired by the cruel and immoral statement below by Darwin in The Descent of Man:

"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated ; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination : we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

Darwinism helped pave the way for bloodshed, cruelty and oppression in a variety of ways:

(1) Creating the myth that human origins had been scientifically explained, Darwinism helped paved the way for totalitarian atheism, which in Russia, China and Cambodia proved to be history's most enormous engine of mass murder and oppression, cropping up many tens of millions of dead bodies at the hands of people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, along with millions of others who were put in the living hell of places such as the Soviet gulag prison camps. For example, in the wikipedia.org article “Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union,” we read, “The total number of Christian victims under the Soviet regime has been estimated to range between 12-20 million.” We read details such as these:

•  “In the years 1917–1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested; 95,000 were put to death, executed by firing squad.” 
• "During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot."

Similarly, a CIA document refers to attacks by the Red Guard in Maoist China that "spared no religious group in China." On the page here we read of some of the unspeakable persecutions Communist officials used on religious students (seminarians). 

(2) Creating the very absurd myth that humans did not fundamentally differ from animals, a ludicrous claim taught by Darwin himself, Darwinism paved the way for people to slaughter their fellow men while thinking they were doing something not much worse than killing animals. 

(3) Centered around phrases such as "struggle for existence," "the preservation of favored races," and "survival of the fittest," Darwinism provided an ideological underpinning for systems such as Hitlerism, Leninism and Maoism that were based on the cruelest exploitation and oppression of the weak by the strong. 

All of this was so unnecessary, because a proper analysis of biology would have had centered upon things such as cooperation and harmony and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence, which are all necessary in mountainous amounts for organisms and ecosystems to exist. A careful study of such things will tend to lead you in the opposite direction of some emphasis on a brutal "struggle for existence," and also lead you away from all boasts of understanding how we got such marvels. But rather than studying the gigantic levels of cooperation and harmony and coordination and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence within nature, which were things defying his boasts, Darwin shunned a study of such key facets of nature, focusing on only things that fitted in with his explanatory boasts. 

The effects of Darwinism on human history have been extremely pernicious. Darwinism continues to be a comfort for racists trying to justify their erroneous claims. The continued popularity of  Darwinism in academia (despite the disastrous moral effects of Darwinism) is not so surprising when we consider that Marxism was popular in pockets of US academia during the late 1960's, at a time when the worst bloody excesses of the Maoist Cultural Revolution were occurring, and decades after millions had needlessly died under the hands of Marxist regimes such as Stalin's. A small fraction of professors in sociology and economics continues to support Marxism. It is sometimes joked that Marxism is dead everywhere in the world except in academia.

It is good for a person to study things such as (1) the psychic phenomena and brain physical shortfalls that lead to the idea that all humans are souls rather than mere animals; (2) the fine-tuned laws and fundamental constants of the universe that lead us to suspect the existence of not just eternal laws of physics but eternal laws of morality;  (3) the gigantic degree of cooperation and harmony and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence  within the bodies of humans. Such studies may inspire in that person a beneficial ethics in which respect for all humans and harmony and the cooperative teamwork of very diverse agents is emphasized and prized, an ethic that is the opposite of the cruel and morally poisonous "survival of the fittest" ideology.  

Postscript: On the page here of The Black Book of Communism, we read this estimate of state-caused deaths in communist countries:

U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths

China: 65 million deaths

Vietnam: I million deaths

North Korea: 2 million deaths

Cambodia: 1 million deaths

Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths

Africa: 1.7 million deaths

Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths