LINK TO ORIGINAL AUDIO LECTURE
THE ISSUE OF RACE
We're going to talk today about a very controversial issue, the issue of race. Let's clarify a number of points here. Throughout history there has been a struggle for power, a struggle for power between tribes, a struggle for power between nations. When one side wins, it often tends to declare itself to be superior. The people who lose obviously aren't too keen about being classified as inferior, so sometimes in a few years - sometimes 100 years later, they'll come back and beat the guys who claimed to be superior and then they'll claim to be superior.
"SUPERIORITY" IS DEFINED BY HISTORY
The point is that superiority and inferiority in history are defined by history; they are not defined by intellectual books or what ever. Now at the end of the 19th century, governments run by white males, most of them being democracy had via a ruthless campaign of imperialism, seized control of most of the planet. This led people to have a lot of delusions about white racial superiority. These were reinforced by studies of ancient India begun in the 18th century and accelerated in the 19th century particularly by a French Orientalist by the name of Gobineau and this became an ideology which was quite widespread.
THE SUPPOSED "BENEVOLENT" RACISM OF THE 19TH CENTURY
After 1945, in the horrors of Hitler's Holocaust, a lot of people claimed that they had nothing to do with it. This is not true since this concept of white racial superiority that was interpreted in a lot of different ways, including the so-called "benevolent burden of racism" - the "white man's burden" that now that the white man a done this bang up job of running everything he now had a burden for straightening out everybody else and so on and so forth.
BY THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY, WHITE MEN RULE MOST OF THE GLOBE
THIS LEADS TO DISASTER
We have to look at what happened after these people took over the planet. We've had two disastrous world wars where the white males fought among themselves and that caused their whole imperial structure in terms of direct imperialism to collapse, but direct imperialism was replaced by economic imperialism.
Much more important however was the fact that this set in motion the greatest crisis in human history: the destruction of the biological foundations of life. So if you're really going to step back and talk about inferiority and superiority, white males could possibly be considered the most inferior species the world's ever produced.
DEBATES OVER ETHNIC RACIAL SUPERIORITY ARE FRANKLY STUPID
THIS IS NOT THE ISSUE
Now we're not really, not going to get into that and we think it is destructive and frankly stupid to get into theories about which race is superior to which race. It's just plain stupid. The superiority and inferiority is defined by actions, not by claims. So our view is let's have the most equal opportunity and let things sort themselves out. It's just that basic, and there is very little genetic evidence that mixing races is going to create some total disaster and so on and so forth. There is just not that much evidence about that and so that's not really an issue.
IS INTELLIGENCE TIED TO ONE'S GENETIC CODE?
Now, the issue of race is unfortunately sometimes connected and perhaps usually connected to a completely different issue, which is the issue of genetics or by its politically controversial term, "eugenics." Now what that relates to is the inequality of people. Now the details of how people are or are not unequal are very hard to determine. There is also another fact, is intelligence is somewhat hereditary? The answer is yes, but underline the word "somewhat." There is not a one-to-one correlation and the honest answer is that science does not know, it does not know at this point in time. Now the latter point at this point in time is highly relevant as we are in the middle of a biotechnology revolution, and every day advances are made on sequencing the human genome. So what's coming is the ability to clone human beings, is the ability to build a super being from genetic parts. Now we need to go back to some basic questions here, which are highly controversial: the inheritance of intelligence. Yes there is a lot of convincing evidence about that, but it's not clear, it's not a one-to-one situation, and there are a whole lot of variables that can be put in here.
SOCIAL DARWINISM AND THE CAPITALIST MARKETPLACE
Now in the late 19th century where a lot of these ideas got rolling was the concept of social Darwinism. Now the problem with social Darwinism, which suggested that there would be some natural sorting out process via the marketplace, is that the marketplace, the capitalist marketplace, is a crazy system and is hardly some system that would be logical for sorting people out.
PLATO SUPPORTS EUGENICS AND HATES COMMERCE
Take for just an elemental example, Plato the greatest philosopher in Greece, he strongly believed in genetics, and if you will eugenics. He also believed in euthanasia, but Plato detested commerce and would've completely detested the modern plutocratic system as any kind of system of a meritocracy. So this is not really something that can be directly put together. It cannot.
CREATING AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FUTURE
So we need to look at the larger picture of offering the maximum amount of equal opportunity, and that's why we at world future fund are so strongly in favor of the University without walls, the issue of the Internet as a means of educating people, particularly people who do not have financial resources.
THE EVOLUTION OF BIO-TECHNOLOGY IN CHINA
This is the best way to go, but we need to be keeping in mind about a subject that is not discussed but is coming, and we hear a lot of reports about experiments in China in relation to this, which is the evolution of biotechnology, is going to allow the scientific, or arbitrary, or whatever you want to call it, control of the human genetic code and the breeding of specific kinds of human beings: larger brains, stronger muscles, resistance to disease. This is coming. This is going to be scientifically possible and the details of this are something that we shall discuss in future lectures. So they're going to be huge issues coming in relation to that.
MAKING MORAL DECISIONS ABOUT LIFE AND DEATH
IN THE WAKE OF THE PLANET'S FUTURE CRISIS
On a more grim situation, there is also going to be some very tough business decisions that are going to have to be made due to the unsustainability of the current diluted system that was built by white males in the late 19th century and is going up to today, which is that this is a system that is almost certainly going to crash, and you're talking about a minimum death toll of about 2 billion. So the issue of who is going to be on the losing end of that business decision is going to be a very controversial issue and there are legitimate issues to be discussed relating to euthanasia: in other words, should elderly vegetables who are brain-dead be kept alive, and divert resources to that, while healthy children are denied resources and allowed to die? Is that a moral position? We do not think so and this opens up a whole series of questions as to who's going to be allowed to die and who is because those choices are going to becoming. So these are further issues that need to be debated and discussed. This is the end of this lecture
This is the second lecture on the controversial subject of what we might describe as the politics of life and death.
THE POLITICS OF LIFE AND DEATH
Regarding the issue of genetics, we wanted to reiterate that not only is it not clear what the direct relationship between inheritance of intelligence is, it's entirely possible for two morons to produce a child that has a high level of intelligence, again we don't pretend to know the answer to these questions of what is the percentage, how why what, because it's very complicated to clarify the difference between environmental implications and genetic implication. The point that people need to understand is that the manner in which the genetic code sorts and resorts itself in the process of human reproduction is very complex, and it's not a mindless one to one correlation.
NATIONAL SECURITY AND THE GENETIC REVOLUTION
So we wanted to elaborate on that point that it we just strongly favored the issue of equal opportunity and the exact details of when children have reached a certain age in a supposedly equal opportunity society; What happens in terms of how much the state spends on their future development? That's a subject for another lecture and another discussion, but we wanted to reiterate that point. Now a second point relates to the issue of national security and the genetic revolution. Since 911, we've seen the American government basically toss the Constitution into the trash and go whole hog on trying to set up a totalitarian system of state control.
BARACK OBAMA ACCELERATES TOTALITARIAN REVOLUTION IN AMERICA
In 2008 the country elected an Afro-American Harvard law professor as President. Now surely he'd be in favor of civil rights, human rights and so on. Quite the contrary. Barack Obama has accelerated - really - a quantum level Bush's totalitarian revolution and indeed claiming things that a lot of the world's greatest dictators, Hitler and Stalin, never claimed. Barack Obama has claimed that he has the right to kill anybody, anywhere at any time on the entire planet. Now there is a word for that. That's megalomania, as well as the creation of an electronic monitoring system that is beyond the wildest dreams of the totalitarian states of the last century.
SO CALLED DEMOCRACIES VIOLATE THEIR OWN IDEALS
So since 911, we've seen that the democracies, so-called "democracies" many people consider them Plutocracies, for the so-called democracies have very little confidence in their own ideals and won't hesitate to violate their so-called ideals of when the issues of national security, terrorism, so on and so forth is brought up. We also should bring up the fact that the first time since the 18th century, and something that all Hitler and Stalin never dared to do, the United States under Bush legitimized the use of torture and Barack Obama has done everything possible to suppress the investigation of that torture.
THE FUTURE OF THE BIO-TECHNOLOGY ARMS RACE
So these are relevant points. Getting back to the issue of genetics, lets create a scenario; details about China's eugenics program become more and more public. China's going to be able to produce supposed super warriors with their genetics program. In light of the morally bankrupt state of American politics, does anybody think that America will stand back and do nothing if that's the case?
They would say, "Well we would never do something like that. well of course not." so there's going to be a whole lot of chest thumping and hand wringing and "oh my gosh we really don't want to do this, but we have to," you can just think of 45 different flavors of bull shit that will be dished up to pretty the situation up.
But you very well may have a genetics or eugenics arms race between the major powers to create super warrior soldiers. That's extremely likely, and so these are points of what's to come. Particularly if the world situation becomes more unstable due to the problems in the green revolution, the destabilization of the environment leading to a world in which billions are dying, and as we mentioned before when billions of people are going to be killed, that can lead to a lot of people being in a rather unhappy mood, they're not going to think that's very good and that will lead to an increase in terrorism so on and so forth as well as there's going to be an increase in diseases.
FEAR WILL FUEL THE BIOLOGICAL ARMS RACE
Particularly in America which doesn't have national health insurance and that's an invitation for an epidemic. So all of this is going to breed a very fearful situation and the same kind of thinking that threw the Constitution out the door relating to civil liberties since 911 among both parties, among both parties it was a bipartisan decision. It is almost certainly going to lead to a bipartisan decision on the issue of eugenics and it's a virtual certainty you can certainly count on the U.S. politicians to throw their morals trash - and so that's something that's going to be coming.
DANIEL ELLSBERG REVEALS THE INCREDIBLE SCOPE OF OBAMA'S LEGAL REVOLUTION
In conclusion, it's very interesting; a prophetic figure is Daniel Ellsberg who revealed the lies in the Vietnam War via the Pentagon papers. He made a very cogent observation about Barack Obama which pointed out the truly breathtaking scope of Obama's legal revolution, Ellsberg points out Obama doesn't want to just scrap the Bill of Rights, Obama wants to go all the way back to the Magna Carta, the foundation of British civil law relating to individual liberties. He was to scrap that too.
So this is a breathtaking legal revolution right now before you've had billions of people dying and so on and so forth. So the other issue that will fuel more instability is Obama reigniting a nuclear arms race with the only power that can obliterate the United States in about 30 minutes [Russia]. So these are all further problems and we haven't even begun to discuss the possible aspect of nuclear proliferation and so on and so forth if the whole international order really starts coming off that the wheels, really start coming off the car.
So these are further issues and these are things that are going to be coming and are not discussed but need to be discussed. That's the end of this second lecture.