1/Interesting read from 1953. Charles Galton Darwin’s The Next Million Years. Some quotes
2/The only imaginable way of overcoming these difficulties would be to set up a class of consultants who would prescribe what marriages were eugenically admissible and how large the consequent families should be.
3/....a tame animal must have a master, and that therefore though it might conceivably be possible to tame the majority of mankind, this could only be done by leaving untamed a minority of the population.
4/Moreover, this minority would have to be the group possessing the most superior qualities of all.
5/Another feature of creeds seems to be rather general. Though the majority of a population, say something like nine-tenths, accept their creed implicitly and regard it as part of the law of nature, there is always a small minority who do not.
6/Most people - call them the sheep - follow the ideas of their leaders unquestioningly, but this minority - the goats - goes by contraries, and disbelieves anything just because those around them believe it. The goats are .......usually above the average of intelligence.
7/It is probably the corroding influence of the goats that gradually saps the vitality of a creed by its cumulative infection, and indeed there may well be a proportionality between the number of goats in a community and the life span of the creed of the sheep in that community.
8/In the past there have been creeds, such, for example, as the belief in magic or divination, which have been very widely accepted, but we now know them to have been quite absurdly false. Yet they have exerted the very greatest influence on human history.
9/The degree that any creeds, regardless of its absurdity, can be developed using modern forms of education was elaborated on by Bertrand Russell.From Bertrand Russell's book The Impact of Science on Society
10/This subject [mass psychology/education] will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship
11/The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakeable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive
12/Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten.
13/Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective.
14/Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity.
15/When homo sapiens is changing, it will not be by the whole race gaining simultaneously whatever qualities better fit it for survival, but rather by certain types of mankind proving superior to the rest in survival value
16/ .....medical science might succeed in materially lengthening life without senility, though in a world of overcrowded population it is not very clear what would be gained.
17/there will have to be a revision of the doctrine of the sanctity of the individual human life.... it is hardly too much to say that most diseases have come under control, or anyhow to judge by recent progress most of them soon will.
17a/But is the world the better for having a large number of healthy people dying of starvation, rather than letting them die of malaria?
18/Looking a little deeper there is the possibility of substantially altering the intellectual and moral natures of individuals by some sort of hormonal injections; already great effects have been produced in animals.
19/Finally, as the most curious speculation of all, it is not quite impossible that it may one day be feasible to select in advance the sex of each child that is to be born
20/The idea of using injection to alter mankind was also promoted by Bertrand Russell in his book The Impact of Science on Society:
21/Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.
22/Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.
23/....a dictator should ever aspire to bring about some really permanent change in humanity, he could do it if, and only if, he knew how to alter some of the human genes, for only so could the changed quality become anchored as a fixed character of the race.
24/For example, there might be a drug, which, without other harmful effects, removed the urgency of sexual desire, and so reproduced in humanity the status of workers in a beehive.
25/A dictator would certainly welcome the compulsory administration of the “contentment drug” to his subjects.
26/Civilization has taught man how to live in dense crowds, and by that very fact those crowds (will) constitute a majority of the world’s population. Already there are many who prefer this crowded life, but there are others who do not, and these will be gradually eliminated.
27/Life in the crowded condition of cities has many unattractive features, but in the long run these may be overcome, not so much by altering them, but simply by changing the human race into liking them.
28/If the fuel problem is solved completely, so that mechanical power and transportation is available in the future to a greater extent even than at present, then the provinces will be large; for example, the whole of Europe may well be one, and the whole of North America another
29/ if there is ever to be a world government, it will have to function as governments do now, in the sense that it will have to coerce a minority—and indeed it may often be a majority—into doing things they do not want to do
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