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By: brianmacker

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There is no ideology called Social Darwinism.   It was invented as a defamatory label later in history to retroactively apply to prior thinkers.   The supposed father of Social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, was essentially defamed by the label because he did NOT believe any of the nonsense attributed to him.

“It is very easy for you, O respectable citizen, seated in your easy chair, with your feet on the fender, to hold forth on the misconduct of the people – very easy for you to censure their extravagant and vicious habits …. It is no honor to you that you do not spend your savings in sensual gratification; you have pleasures enough without. But what would you do if placed in the position of the laborer? How would these virtues of yours stand the wear and tear of poverty? Where would your prudence and self-denial be if you were deprived of all the hopes that now stimulate you …? Let us see you tied to an irksome employment from dawn till dusk; fed on meager food, and scarcely enough of that …. Suppose your savings had to be made, not, as now, out of surplus income, but out of wages already insufficient for necessaries; and then consider whether to be provident would be as easy as you at present find it. Conceive yourself one of a despised class contemptuously termed “the great unwashed”; stigmatized as brutish, stolid, vicious … and then say whether the desire to be respectable would be as practically operative on you as now. … How offensive it is to hear some pert, self-approving personage, who thanks God that he is not as other men are, passing harsh sentence on his poor, hard-worked, heavily burdened fellow countrymen ….” (Social Statics, pp. 203–5)

You might like to read this,
Herbert Spencer:The Defamation Continues:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long3.html


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