Nikola Tesla the Eugenicist

[RZM]

Tesla boosters of the 21st century will tell you that Tesla was the embodiment of all that is good in the world — Matthew Inman of the Oatmeal did just that in one of his more recent comics, “Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived.” They’ll tell you that Tesla’s struggles against professional adversaries like Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse (both of whom Tesla worked for at various points in his life) were the most pure examples of good versus evil. This past year, people have been crowdfunding museums and films and any number of other events in an attempt to raise Tesla’s profile and are constantly couching his work in moralistic terms. But I hope that with this renewed excitement for the life’s work of a great inventor people don’t lose sight of one thing: he was a brilliant man, but he was just a man.

Like any man, Tesla was far from perfect and sometimes had very warped ideas about how the world should operate. One of Tesla’s most disturbing ideas was his belief in using eugenics to purify the human race. In the 1930s, Tesla expressed his belief that the forced sterilization of criminals and the mentally ill — which was occurring in some European countries (most disturbingly Nazi Germany) and in many states in the U.S. — wasn’t going far enough. He believed that by the year 2100 eugenics would be “universally established” as a system of weeding out undesirable people from the population.

-snip-

The ideas behind eugenics would become substantially less popular after World War II, for obvious reasons. I doubt that Tesla understood the scope of the atrocities that were being committed in Europe (and at the hands of the California eugenics movement) at the time. But again, his ideas were clear: the world should be rid of so-called undesirables. However unpleasant the idea of eugenics is to reasonable people on its surface, this notion seems particularly strange coming from a man like Tesla, whose own mental illnesses would have likely put him in the “undesirable” category under any authoritarian regime.

Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/paleofuture/2012/11/nikola-tesla-the-eugenicist-eliminating-undesirables-by-2100/#ixzz2EkoCjT34
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[NYC_SKP]

1. Nobody's perfect.

But Tesla still deserves to be recognized for what he did.

[RZM]

2. I agree completely

I just thought it was a interesting tidbit. Definitely something I wasn't aware of. These types of ideas certainly were a lot more widespread before WWII.

[NYC_SKP]

3. Yes, seems to have been a peculiarity of the day. (nt)

[mojowork_n]

4. From the Wiki "Eugenics" page entry.....

It's not as if ideas we now group under "population control" and "genetic engineering" don't include some of those same concepts.

[div class="excerpt" style="margin-left: 1em; border: 2px solid #6600cc; border-radius: 0.4615em; box-shadow: 6px 6px 6px #999999;"]At its peak of popularity eugenics was supported by a wide variety of prominent people, including Winston Churchill,[41] Margaret Sanger,[42][43] Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling[44] and Sidney Webb.[45][46][47] Many members of the American Progressive Movement supported eugenics, enticed by its scientific trappings and its promise to cure social ills....

All of those prominent supporters (including Tesla) went on the record *before* 'not allowing people with those conditions to reproduce' got turned in to 'not allowing those people to draw another breath,' ...following the Wannsee Conference, the Final Solution.

[Bucky]

6. That's the conservatives' basis by the way for arguing that liberalism is rooted in racism.

No, I'm not making that up. This is really how they rationalize their smear.

[Bucky]

5. Eugenics was a growing fad in science circles in the 1920s. So he was still ahead of his time.

It wasn't really until the 1940s that eugenics as a science got fully discredited. Hitler helped with that, but so did a more rational approach to scientific research and the rise of gene theory. During its heyday, however, it was seen as a logical progression from other scientific disciplines applied to practical human problems. Eugenics expressed a desire for the ultimate culmination scientific pragmatism in the betterment of society.



For instance, scientific government was a fancy word for what today we call the Progressive Movement. Scientific business management, which today we call Palmerism, was responsible for many of the improvements in working conditions for blue collar workers and was often supported by labor unions. Among the supporters of eugenics, in one form or another, were liberal icons like Margaret Sanger, H. G. Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, and Linus Pauling.

I got this list from Wikipedia, the article for which also points out that the premise of DU favorite movie Idiocracy is based on the fallacies of eugenics theory. More recently, Ross Perot seems to have used the practical side of eugenics theory in the selection of his wife, if not in the selection of his political advisors.

[Odin2005]

7. Margret Sanger was one, too. Nobody's perfect.

It was a stupid intellectual fad with horrible results, much like "Evolutionary Psychology" today, which is used to justify patriarchy, militarism, and sexism.