Page 24 - The Social Weapon: Darwinism

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human beings, in this book and certain other of his writings,
shaped Social Darwinism.

His determined followers then carried matters forward.
The most prominent proponents and practitioners of Social
Darwinism's were Herbert Spencer and Darwin's cousin Francis
Galton in Britain, certain academics like William Graham
Sumner in America, and Darwinists such as Ernst Haeckel, and
later fascist racists like Adolf Hitler in Germany.
Social Darwinism quickly became a means whereby racists,
imperialists, proponents of unfair competition under the banner
of capitalism, and administrators who failed to fulfill their re-
sponsibility to protect the poor and needy attempted to defend
themselves. Social Darwinists sought to portray as a natural law
the oppression of the weak, the poor and so-called “inferior”
races, as well as the elimination of the handicapped by the
healthy, and small businesses by large companies, suggesting
that this was the only way humanity could progress. They
sought to justify all the injustices perpetrated throughout his-
tory under a scientific rationale. Social Darwinism's lack of con-
science and compassion was depicted as a law of nature and the

most important road to so-called evolution.
In particular, various American capitalists justified the cli-
mate of unrestrained competition they established, according to
their own lights, with quotations from Darwin. In fact, however,
this was nothing less than a huge deception. Those who at-
tempted to give ruthless competition a so-called scientific basis
were merely lying. For instance, Andrew Carnegie, one of the
greatest capitalists and one of those caught up in that falsehood,
said the following in a speech he gave in 1889:
The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the
price it pays for cheap comforts and luxuries, is also great; but the
advantages of this law are also greater still than its cost — for it is

The Social Weapon: Darwinism