social Darwinism

Social Darwinism was a bad idea in the 1900s.

It's also the height of social Darwinism and the pseudoscience of race.

In 1965 they revised that old, very racist immigration law; when people talk about people's IQs or where they're from, or denigrate the countries they come from or their culture and who they are, or characterize an entire ethnicity or group of people as somehow subhuman criminals not worthy of citizenship, that kind of talk really does replicate that era of pseudoscience and that era of social Darwinism that led directly to the rise of fascism, and so I find that talk very troubling.

Growing up in a world ruled by social media and social Darwinism — and an older generation’s cluelessness as to what that entails — does, however, form a background to the narrative, such as it is, along with exchanges on the meaning of masculinity and the distorting power of teenage self-image.

Neo-Malthusian refers to the concepts of economist Thomas Malthus, who argued against human overpopulation in the 18th century; social Darwinism is a misapplication of biologist Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to validate conservative social hierarchies.