I came across this text and couldn't resist quoting it :)
Even Gorky wrote that by the third generation of intelligent families, degeneration sets in. Three generations without worry about daily bread and without a struggle for existence – and such a result is almost inevitable.
How to tell a degenerate from a healthy individual? Very simple. For a healthy individual, the main thing is healthy and clear needs. To eat,
(censored), sometimes to fight, to babysit children, to rise above others, to gain power.
But for a degenerate, the main thing is mental comfort.
A healthy individual, as soon as they see, figuratively speaking, a tasty morsel, immediately rushes and latches on. That's not the reaction of a degenerate. This makes his eyelid twitch, that gives him heartburn, something else brings on depression, and another thing causes insomnia or spoils his mood. And regarding everything else, he has strict principles. And so on endlessly. And the main thing for him is to avoid all such disturbing things.
And do you know why once glorious and mighty powers collapse? It's because civilization in them has developed to the point where it can satisfy all the needs of the majority of the population. Or, at least, of the elite. And ensure existence without a struggle for existence and without worry about daily bread.
Three to four generations of such existence for the majority of the population, and the power is gone. In the past, only the elite degenerated. Due to the weak development of productive forces. Now entire nations and even races are degenerating. See signs above.
Starting with Malthus, everyone fears overpopulation, resource shortages and famine, wars and violence as a result. But such things have happened many times in human history. And they led not to the degradation of the human race, but on the contrary – only to the intensification of the struggle for existence and the strengthening of genetic selection. The gene pool of the population only improved from this.
But what is truly dangerous for the human population is not the horrors according to Malthus, but satiety in conditions of abundance. The construction of a genuine "society of universal well-being."
Humanity is lured by the mirage of universal happiness in conditions of abundance and security. This aspiration is genetically predetermined. It is precisely this that drives the progress of civilization. But God forbid humanity should achieve its ideal! Our genetic system of regulating behavior through desires, formed over millions of years of evolution, is not functional in these conditions.
This will be a real disaster for the species Homo Sapiens – if the continuous increase in humanity's well-being is not periodically interrupted by monstrous wars and catastrophes. And this will continue until humanity understands genetics well enough to be able to correct its own genome in order to avoid inevitable degeneration in conditions of total domination over nature and universal abundance.
But that will already be a completely different humanity. Genetically modified.
And until then, the only path to self-preservation for humanity is unbridled reproduction and population control not through birth control, but through wars, famine, and other horrors of the struggle for existence that Malthus warned about.
For the purpose of natural selection – so far the only way to improve the genome. To avoid degeneration and population extinction.
(c)stolen from here -
http://bulochnikov.livejournal.com/167559.html