Humanity needs survivors. No one can deny that. We need people who are strong, people who are smart and healthy. We need people who are hard working, compassionate, and logical. All these qualities arguably can result from natural selection. However, in current American society, we have all but completely suppressed natural selection and are heading towards a complete abandonment of artificial selection. I will say this with seemingly very little regard to anything other than logic: strength must be rewarded.

I challenge you to remove me and yourself from this and simply see the logic of the situation. Paint a picture of the current situation without bias of fortune and privilege.

What I propose is a society where we support opportunity, community, and help and where welfare is something to fall back on and not a way to prevail. People should be granted the opportunity to survive and the sense of community that fosters insurance. But the way the current welfare system is in the United States, is not helping grow a stronger community. Welfare can be horribly destructive to a society and it is doing exactly that with American society. People can survive because of the welfare system. Food stamps, for example, can be abused in situations to enable people who are not survivors, to survive.

When people read this, they may think I am proposing a bitter society, with no compassion. But in reality, what I would want to see, and I believe would result from a restructuring of welfare, is a healthier, happier human race. Some people I believe are without the work ethic to sustain themselves. They are surviving off the hard work of others. You can envision the corporate greed and all the CEOs driving around in their Cadillacs but what is really true is that the farmers are who keep us all alive. Food is the basic necessity that unites every being on planet earth. The farmers are the ones working to sustain those who are too weak to sustain themselves.

Natural selection was abandoned with the introduction of technology. We no longer had to physically fight for survival but instead a form of selection was created with the introduction of capitalism. People who were cunning and smart; those like John D. Rockefeller and Warren Buffet at the top of the list, knew how to make money. But while this artificial selection guided our country to the top, it has been all but abandoned.

What I intend to point out is that there are survivalists in the system that is currently in place that would not otherwise be in a field guided by selection. Those who persist are those who reproduce, not those without harmful mutations or with higher intelligence or greater strength. The theory I am talking may sound all too similar to Nazism (I have been accused of this before) but there is a fundamental difference. Nazism sought to institute a genocide of those who were seen as “less than human” and worked to increase the offspring production of those who were seen as fittest. This is a sort of forced selection. It is like breeding fit animals in a lab, rather than letting the animals follow the natural path in the wild. Hitler intended to promote a superior race and while I would look to produce a better human race, the means would be completely different. I would argue that instead of the uneven tapering of welfare, that it would be equally accessible for everyone. What this would mean is a system where people are able to take risks and still have the support to fall back on. But survival under the welfare system would be impossible. When a rock climber falls from the cliff face, they do not fall to their demise, like they would in the primitive days of man. They do not die because of a simple slip, an accident. They are caught and supported by a rope and harness. But quickly that harness becomes uncomfortable and the climber is rewarded by supporting his own weight, without using the uncomfortable harness, and by striving to reach the top. That is what I would like to see: a welfare system with a cap, a temporary catch that quickly depletes unless the person attempts to regain footing on their own.

I firmly believe that what we are doing right now is less humane than this. From this system, true, some people would suffer. But overall sufficiency would be supported with compassion and insufficiency would not be rewarded as it is in our current society. While this seems like a horrible cruel way to treat the impoverished, I believe it is the solution to poverty. I believe that the more we continue to support and reward poverty the way we do today, the percentage of the population in poverty will only continue to increase in number. We would need to keep the restrictions on the wealthy and maintain the balance of power of course. Simply because someone is most cunning financially does not mean they should be the only ones to survive. Intelligence needs to be rewarded alongside savviness alongside physical strength alongside effort. I do not want to see a compassionless society but I do think we would benefit from stopping rewarding insufficiency.