“Weak genes,” “survival of the fittest,” and other sentiments to suggest leaving people to die instead of helping them are also just.. eugenics, when you get right down to it. Which is probably one of the purest forms of evil mankind has ever come up with. A trumped-up amalgamation of every sort of bigotry rolled into one, all neatly couched in well-funded pseudoscience.
If you don’t mind a slight detour—the IQ tests we use today were “developed” by a devout American eugenicist named Lewis Terman, who was literally a member of the American Eugenics Society. But in true pompous dickhead fashion, Terman actually didn’t “develop” anything. He stole the design of the test, slapped his name on it, and applied it the absolute wrongest ways just to make himself (and other privileged, cis, straight, white, neurotypical, landowning businessmen) feel superior.
It was *actually* developed by an anti-eugenic Jewish psychologist living in pre-Nazi Germany, named William Stern, who specifically warned that the test SHOULD NOT BE USED AS A TEST OF INTELLIGENCE BECAUSE THAT ISNT HOW BRAINS WORK.
Stern had created the test with other psychologists, solely as a way of tracking the mental development of children, to help identify different mental conditions at an early age, and develop treatments. The entire point was to make sure that kids who faced these problems would still have a fair shot in life. NOT to stratify all of goddamned humanity into a fictional hierarchy of Objective Intelligence.
The “scores” on these tests were never meant to imply superiority or particular intelligence, just the relative “mental age” of the patient compared with others their own age. Numerically, the scores were relatively small numbers, where “1” was the standard expectation for a child at a given age. “1.01” would’ve been slightly above expectation. “0.99” would’ve been slightly below.
And here’s the dumbest part. The reason today’s IQ tests have scores like “125” or “86” is because Terman just multiplied all the results by 100 to make them sound more impressive. “I scored a 1.3” just isn’t very exciting. But “130? I’m a genius!” And that perceived impressiveness let him sell the IQ test (which again, was meant to help kids who had trouble paying attention in school) as an egomaniacal tool of mind control to the Eugenics community.
Evil, insecure assholes will take anything—any idea meant to help people—-and poison it beyond recognition, just to make sure they come out on top.
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
dailybridgerton
tangentwithtanner
kaledo-art
turnnoffyourmind
origamiaround
annaxmalina
stormborns
izzy806
