In 1932, a year after Dr. Weston Price began his studies on
healthy, non-industrialized peoples, New York City hosted the Third
Eugenics Conference. Eugenics promoted the “directed evolution of man”
made possible by a global scientific and medical dictatorship, which
proposed to improve the lot of mankind by making “better” people, rather
than resolving the conditions that led to poverty and ill health.
Speaking at the conference, and evoking the Darwinian concept of
“survival of the fittest,” Fairfield Osborn, a British Fascist and
adherent of Malthusian principles, stated that eugenics “aids and
encourages the survival and multiplication of the fittest; indirectly,
it would check and discourage the multiplication of the unfitted. As to
the latter, in the United States alone, it is widely recognized that
there are millions of people who are acting as dragnets or sheet anchors
on the progress of the ship of state. . . While some highly competent
people are unemployed, the mass of unemployment is among the less
competent, who are first selected for suspension, while the few highly
competent people are retained because they are still indispensable. [Remember that these remarks occur during the bottom of the Great Depression.]
In nature, these less-fitted individuals would gradually disappear, but
in civilization, we are keeping them in the community in the hopes that
in brighter days, they may all find employment. This is only another
instance of humane civilization going directly against the order of
nature and encouraging the survival of the un-fittest.” Osborn’s speech
was published in the New York Times, August 23, 1932 under the headline “’Birth Selection’ the Remedy in Crisis of Over-Population.”
In the U.S., the practice of eugenics took the form of marriage
prohibitions and forced sterilization. Starting in 1907, thirty states
passed laws promoting the sterilization of the ”unfit.”
The logo for the Second Eugenics Conference shows a tree with many
roots, labeled as follows: anatomy, anthropology, anthropometry,
archaeology, biography, biology, economics, education, ethnography,
genealogy, genetics, geology, law, medicine, mental testing, psychiatry,
physiology, psychology, religion and sociology.
What’s missing here? Nutrition! Not a single root is labeled “Nutrition.”
While a bunch of pseudoscientists were scheming on how to eliminate
the impoverished, the unwashed and the unhealthy, Dr. Weston Price was
quietly studying the effects of modern processed foods on the form,
health, behavior and intelligence of human beings throughout the globe.
The eugenicists claimed the physical degeneration that Price observed
was due to race mixing. Price was quick to disagree. “Nature always
builds harmoniously if conditions are sufficiently favorable, regardless
of race, color or location,” he said.
In Chapter One of his masterpiece, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration,
Price makes it clear that the change in physical form he observed with
the change in diet has nothing to do with heredity or “race mixing”
–based on what he observed, unlike the eugenicists whose pronouncements were based on what they wanted to believe.
“It is important to preface the observations by constructing a mental
pattern of physical excellence from the pictures of the various
primitive groups and, with this yardstick or standard of normalcy,
observe our modern patterns. Certain preconceived ideas may have to be
modified, as for example, that based on the belief that what we see is due to heredity or that deformity is due to mixing of races. If
so, why should the last child in a large family generally suffer most,
and often be different in facial form; or why should there be these
changes in the later children, even in pure racial stocks, after the
parents have adopted our modern types of nutrition? Although the causes
of physical degeneration that can be seen easily have been hard to
trace, the defects in the development of the brain, which affect the
mind and character, are much more obscure, and the causes of mental
degeneration are exceedingly difficult to trace. Much that formerly has
been left to the psychiatrist to explain is now rapidly shifting to the
realm of the anatomist and physiologist (emphasis added).”
In Chapter Twenty-One, “Practical Application of Primitive Wisdom,”
Price addresses the subject again, specifically in response to the 1926
book Genius (Some Revaluations) by A. C. Jacobson.
“In the observations and deductions presented in the foregoing
chapters are exerting as controlling an influence on individual and
national character as seems to be indicated, the problem of the outlook
for our modern civilization is changed in many important aspects. One of
the most urgent changes in our viewpoint should be to look upon the
assortment of physical, mental and moral distortions as due, in
considerable part, to nutritional disturbances in one or both parents
which modify the development of the child, rather than to accepted
factors in the inheritance. The evidence indicates that these parental
disturbances of nutritional origin may affect the germ plasm, thus
modifying the architecture, or may prevent the mother from building a
complete fetal structure, including the brain. In other words, these
data indicate that instead of dealing entirely with hereditary factors,
we are dealing in part with distortions due to inhibitions of normal
hereditary processes. This changes the prospects for the offspring of
succeeding generations. Atavism will still have plenty to her credit
even if she must give up her claim to distortions of individual
characteristics.
“Jacobson has summarized the determining factors in individuality and
personality when he says ‘The Jekyll-Hydes of our common life are
ethnic hybrids.’ Most current interpretations are fatalistic and leave
practically no escape from our succession of modern physical, mental and
moral cripples.
“Jacobson says of our modern young people: ‘Very much of the strange
behavior of our young people to-day is simply due to their lack of
ethnical anchorage; they are bewildered hybrids, unable to believe
sincerely in anything, and disowned by their own ancestral manes. To
turn these neurotic hybrids loose in the world by the million, with no
background, no heritage, no code, is as bad as imposing illegitimacy;
their behavior, instead of expressing easily, naturally and
spontaneously a long-used credo, will be determined by fears and
senseless taboos. How can character be built upon such foundations?
There is a ludicrous as well as a pathetic side to the situation
presented by a Greek puzzled by his predominantly German children, or by
the German woman unable to understand her predominantly Spanish
progeny. It is a foolish case over again of hen hatching ducklings, of
wolf fostering foundlings.’
“If our modern degeneration were largely the result of incompatible
racial stocks as indicated by these premises, the outlook would be
gloomy in the extreme. Those who find themselves depressed by this
current interpretation of controlling forces would do well to recall the
experiments on pigs referred to in Chapters 17 and 18, in which a large
colony all born blind and maimed because of maternal nutritional
deficiency–from deficient vitamin A–were able to beget offspring with
normal eyes and normal bodies when they themselves had normal nutrition.
“Much emphasis has been placed on the incompatibility of certain
racial bloods. According to Jacobson: ‘Aside from the effects of
environment, it may safely be assumed that when two strains of blood
will not mix well a kind of molecular insult occurs which the biologists
may some day be able to detect beforehand, just as blood is now tested
and matched for transfusion.’
’It is fortunate that there is a new explanation for the distressing
old doctrine which holds that geniuses cannot be born unless there is an
abundant crop of defectives. In this connection Jacobson says, ‘The
genius tends to be a product of mixed ethnic and nervously peculiar
stock–stock so peculiar that it exhibits an unusual amount of badness.
The human family pays dearly for its geniuses. Just as nature in general
is prodigal in wasting individuals for the development of a type, or
species, so do we here find much human wastage apparently for a similar
purpose. One may think of the insane and the defectives as so many
individuals wasted in order that a few geniuses may be developed. It
would seem’ that in order to produce one genius there must be battalions
of criminals, weaklings and lunatics. Nietzsche must have had biologic
implications of this sort in mind when he spoke of the masses as merely
fertilizers for the genius. This is why the genius has been compared to
the lily on the dunghill. He absorbs all the energy of his family group,
leaving the fertilizing mass depleted.’
“Our recent data on the primitive races indicate that this theory is
not true, since in a single generation various types and degrees of
physical, mental or moral crippling may occur in spite of their purity
of blood and all that inheritance could accomplish as a reinforcement
through the ages.”
The Nazi application of eugenic principles during the Second World
War opened the eyes of the world to what eugenics was really about—a
justification for genocide–and the concept fell into disfavor—or at
least went underground. But do not think that eugenic thinking has
disappeared.
In 1972, the Club of Rome published a report titled, “The Limits to
Growth,” which argued that if the current trends in population growth
and industrialization continued, the Earth would run out of food and
resources within one hundred years. In a 2017 interview,
Dennis Meadows, one of the report’s main authors (and a member of the
World Economic Forum), argued for drastic population reduction. “We
could . . . have eight or nine billion, probably, if we have a very
strong dictatorship which is smart … and [people have] a low standard of
living … But we want to have freedom and we want to have a high
standard of living so we’re going to have a billion people. And we’re
now at seven, so we have to get back down. I hope that this can be
slow, relatively slow and that it can be done in a way which is
relatively equal, you know, so that people share the experience.”
Actually, the invisible controllers have already figured out how to
reduce the world’s population in a way that is “relatively slow and. . .
can be done in a way which is relatively equal. . . so that people
share the experience.” It’s called the Dietary Guidelines for
Americans, which advocates for a diet based on industrial seed oils
rather than nutrient-dense animal fats, and warns against the evils of
meat and salt. It takes several generations, but the negative effects
on the health and fertility of the nation have been relentless. (To that
add poisoning from vaccinations, fluoride, mercury and agricultural
chemicals and you have the perfect “eugenic” formula.)
Since the devastation of these Guidelines has been “relatively equal”
on all classes, more prosperous Americans are suffering from
infertility or having severely unhealthy children just as frequently as
the poor.” Desperate for “designer babies,” they pursue such techniques
as genetic testing, in vitro fertilization and egg transplants
from attractive donors, and pin their hopes on the promised benefits of
cloning and genetic manipulation. In their book From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice,
bioethicists Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel
Wikler argue for the adoption of as many “eugenic enhancement”
technologies as possible, using the genome to have “better babies.”
I have news for these folks: none of these techniques will give them
“better” babies. Only the kind of nutrient-dense diets that nourished
healthy primitive people will do that. We need to recognize the fact
that the genetic blueprint of every human being is not flawed but
perfect; but its full expression requires wise practices in food,
farming and the healing arts (including the spacing of children).
Eugenics is the duty of every parent, in order to ensure the birthright
of every child: good health, perfect form, keen mind and a desire in the
heart to create a better world. True eugenics will be accomplished by
putting our animals on pasture, eating butter and adding liver to our
sausages, rather than by tinkering with the genetic code.
Sally Fallon - Nourishing Traditions
