Post 1945 : diverse Hope replaces purified Hope

Popular opinion in this post-1945 era (often even among those who were adults before the War) increasingly takes it for granted that humanity is better off if we diversify our genetic investments ---- a fundamental 180 degree shift from our previous thinking and yet a seismic shift that has gone un-noticed.

Today, we feel more secure when we preserve, deepen and expand our gene pools and oppose risking the whole farm by putting all our genetic bets behind one horse.

Our best hope for making an unknown and uncertain future into a safe and prosperous future, we believe, lies in having kept a diversity of options before us.

We prefer the safe dullness of a steady if slow walk towards progress over a leap of faith into a future that may not turn out to be as bright as stars as promised but rather proves as dark as hell.

How very different, in fact diametrically opposite, was popular opinion in the years immediately before 1945 !

Thanks to widespread faith in the claims of leading scientists in the Sunday papers, the future seemed increasingly, knowable, certain and controllable.

Humanity's experts, avoiding the messy debating of democracy - had only to distill down and purify the one - right - way ahead and then bin the rest.

Our investment in our future, we believed, wouldn't pay much dividends if we hedged our bets around a thousand useless little investments and placed only a small wager on the one correct and most profitable investment.

Eugenics - the reigning science of that era - was many things but most of all it was seen as a surefire system for beating the House in the casino of life.

A system to win at Genetic Poker.

Eugenics, people believed, could pick (and retain) the winning hands and identify (and discard) the losing hands.

"Survival of only the Fit"

Hands unworthy of being played --- Lives unworthy of Life.

Aktion 4T, The Hunger Plan, Auschwitz were among the many places that the gamblers' 'discards' went ...