November 16, 2012
Nikola Tesla the Eugenicist: Eliminating Undesirables by 2100
Photo of inventor Nikola Tesla from the February 9, 1935 issue of Liberty magazine
Interest in the life of legendary inventor Nikola Tesla has seen a tremendous resurgence in the past two decades. And with good reason. The man was a genius who was able to take so many of the ideas swirling around in the 19th century ether and turn them into fantastic new inventions — both real and imagined. Tesla’s wondrous imagination made him quite the futurist and here at the Paleofuture blog we’ve looked at some of his remarkably prescient predictions over the past few years.
But the 21st century’s rather fashionable interest in Tesla has had some disturbing side effects. Specifically, people want to canonize the man (sometimes literally) and turn his personal and professional struggles into a sort of morality tale involving clearly delineated characters: some ostensibly good and others ostensibly evil.
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.
The February 9, 1935 issue of Liberty magazine includes many other fascinating predictions by Tesla for the future of humanity, which we’ll no doubt look at in the weeks ahead. But for the time being I’ve transcribed only the eugenics portion of Tesla’s predictions below, to remind us that we should be cautious when making gods of men:
The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.
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.
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well, how untolerant could he really be, if he was willing to marry a pidgeon?
joke aside, nice article, love your blog :)
Why should hardcore criminals and the reatrded
have children ?
What kind of parents would they be ?
Do you believe the State is a better parent
than the parent ?
Any scientist knows, if the State is going to pay
for all society’s incapables to have unlimited
amounts of children, whilst the more fit struggle
to make a living, having less children in turn;
the genetic stock of society will suffer, and an
injustice is committed upon the more fit.
That has already begun.
So he held the same views as Margaret Sanger. And, currently, Peter Singer.
I’ve heard this article in Liberty’s February 9, 1935 issue by Tesla was edited by his Nazi apologist friend George Sylvester Viereck.
Fair article. Tesla’s work should still be celebrated, I feel, especially his contributions to mains electricity. I would warn people reading this to take away from it that this was not eugenics for fascism as in the case of the Nazis, but an instance of scientific thinking without morality- almost or just as bad, but I feel it’s important to identify the issue at hand. An asexual man with severe OCD talking of what he names ‘undesirables’ or ‘eugenically unfit’ certainly rings as hypocrisy, I agree. But the museums and suchlike should still go ahead to give the public a better education on that frantic and important period of history. Good point on there being no clear cut good or evil.
Well now Charlie Chaplains mother was mentally ill, the world would have been a poorer place without her sons. That’s only one example. Has far this ‘survival of the fittest’ mantra so popular with the grinchy set, if you look at the fossil records, it’s not survival of the fittest, it’s ‘Revenge of the Nerds.’
there is the problem of who decides who is undesirable, but the ideea is correct, we have messed with the forces of evolution and a lot of deadweight has accumulated in the human species…i’ve got news for you, no “greater beeing” is supervising and making sure we get more inteligent and moral…if the conditions are favorable the human species can go the opposite way to
I think there are a lot more people agreeing with Tesla on this issue, than are willing to come out in the open… of course, most have been brainwashed by the education system and taught, that such thing are tabu. I think we should go further than mentally ill or criminals. Also the inborn physical defets, such as kidney failure, heart defects, etc should warrant sterilization. They only way to for someone like that to be excluded should be if they prove to be a genius in court, so yes you heard right- sterilization courts would be a good idea.
And the reason for all this- just look at how health is deteriorating these days, it will just get worse if people who would not have survived to puberty 100yr ago are now able to live much later & breed, because of modern medicine. The gene pool will become very corrupted, and all humanity will be increadibly sick. Is that ethical in your opinion?
In my opinion when Tesla spoke of future events he usually did so as a way of describing the eventual evolution of our society not necessarily what his beliefs were. People often take what he said as what he believes not what he believes others will accomplish.
Given the notions of genetics and far-from – complete understanding of genetics at the time, eugenics was not an unreasonable conclusion to reach.
We today know more, and our viewpoints are in line with the information of our age.
Who are we to judge someone for coming to the wrong conclusion based upon incomplete and faulty information?
By 1917 Tesla’s was not allowed to be in the Press. This story isn’t confirmed on Wikipedia. Probably written by JP Morgan, David Rockefeller, Thomas Edison and totally BS. There’s no other writings of Tesla’s that claim this and there is an entire Museum in Belgrade of his works.
tesla did not invent the tesla coil–elihu thompson did.
Maxwell/Hertz invented radio.
Charles Schenk Bradley (1853–1929) was the first to apply for
a patent on polyphase power transmission.
Friedrich August Haselwander was the first to patent the polyphase dynamo.
Both the transformer and A.C. only became practical with the
work of Charles Steinmetz.
Telsa was a thief, a fraud, and a crackpot.
I suspect that there were dark forces with certain agendas behind the writing of this “supposed” 1935 article- the words are not at all aligned with Tesla’s ideologies. Tesla was a humanist first, a scientist second. If you read through his interviews, even dating back to the late 19th century, he believed in the oneness of humanity and through his inventions, he sought to help mankind further their potential as unique, complexly beautiful and spiritual beings.
Tesla followed the Buddhist and Hindu schools of thought and this knowledge combined with his understanding of quantum physics really gave him a deep gnosis about how interconnected we all are- at our most quantum level, we are all united, we are all light, and Tesla out of all scientists, past and present, truly believed this.
Who is anyone to decide what another can or cannot do? Isn’t that violating someone’s basic human rights?
Here is a very good documentary about the continuing eugenics going on in the world.
Maafa 21 (2009) Full Length
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02t3Wqg-4Iw
Tesla certainly wasn’t alone in his thinking on the issue. Eugenics was a particularly popular idea among early progressives. It was an extension of the “rule by scientifically trained experts” meme that drove the movement. That it took large scale implementation of the idea (The Holocaust) to discredit it (and it still isn’t entirely discredited in some circles) just shows how wedded progressives were to it.
I love how the writer’s own subjective opinions of morality come into play here. He implies that eugenics in the way that Tesla describes is a bad thing.
In light of this article as well as the timing of it I will just like to inform other readers that yesterday two war criminals (toward Serbian people in Croatia)generals from Croatia which which was previously sentenced to 24 and 18 years in jail by Hag tribunal was relished yesterday was free summarily by decision of US (Hag tribunal)judge Marion. In the same time Australian ministry of foreign affairs had decided to deliver one of the Serbian military leaders from that war to Croatia. Today we have article which without any confirmed authenticity from first hand is mentioned to slam one of rare decent and genius people which ever lived on this planet and which happen to be Serb as well. In 1935 Tesla was already very old man with highly progressed OCD which he gain as consequence of J.P. Morgan, Edison as well as Rockefeller treatment decades earlier. It is very unfortunate and sad that Smithsonian is part of the same evil machinery in US almost a century later. This article is also one of best proofs how synchronized and organised is power elite in US and western Europe and by who is leaded. Trying to comment comments of appearances like Susan simply there is no point.
Tesla was right about eugenics. Eugenics doesn’t have to be radically negative, with sterilization courts, et cetera. Positive eugenics would simply reverse current trends, which are dysgenic, by using incentives to strongly reward people of high genetic quality for having more children — and by strongly subsidizing those of low genetic endowment who help the future by having as few children as possible.
Now, of course, we are doing the opposite.
Whatever nation or group of nations that wholly embraces this concept will come to great wealth and power in a few generations.
These developments will also spell the end of the insane religion of “equality” which still has so many otherwise intelligent people in its grip.
Wow. The misanthropy of some people on this thread is astounding. If you folks believe in sterilization so much, why don’t you begin with yourselves? Prove your commitment to the idea, because I’m sure if we examined your lives closely enough we could find something ‘undesirable’, something not ‘worth passing on’. You *cannot* control people or their behavior. Period. To crib a cliche, ‘Life will find a way’… or it will revolt violently against you. Eugenics has lost, along with communism, social engineering, and Utopia. Get over it y’all and let humans be humans, no matter who – or how many – there are.
We already weed out undesirables by encouraging poor women and young women to get abortions and to encourage all women to abort unhealthy babies. The difference is we now do it under the banners of “women’s rights” or “choice” instead of eugenics. But it’s really the same thing in a politically correct dressing.
Re: Charlie Chaplin’s mother – well if we’d lost Charlie Chaplin, we’d also be without some bottom x% of humanity. That much less crime, that much more productivity, that many more resources. How do you know some more smarter / more stable person wouldn’t have been able to afford having more kids, and one of /them/ might have done … who knows what?
Wow, the comments on this post are extremely disturbing! For the edification of your readership, the next blog post should be titled “Why the holocaust was a bad thing”. You can’t assume people know anything these days.
10 years,
Who gets to decide who the bottom X% of humanity is, and what criteria are they using? No matter how you answer those questions, you have to contend with the inconvenient fact that the people making such judgements and creating such criteria are carrying the same evolutionary baggage as the people they are passing judgement on. In other words, they are in no better position to decide who should live and who should die, than any other of history’s self-proclaimed “betters”.
Lol! Ah, yeah Smithsonian we know you love yourself some Edison. Is this now suppose to make people hate Tesla or something?
Tesla still 100 years before his time. Overpopulation is obviously a problem, just look at all our natural resources, we’re running out of fresh water and that is an absolute fact. We simply don’t have the resources to sustain the amount of humans here. It’s only going to go from bad to worse. Now ask yourself why the F do we need murderers and rapists and psychopaths/mentally ill to reproduce?? What benefit of the greater good will it achieve? For every child a mother has, it increases her carbon footprint TWENTY fold. Now let me ask you why the F should we allow a single mother with 6 kids from 4 different men that all live off welfare have anymore children? Why not let the highly intelligent have children and give them support. Not the promiscuous mother with no job or male figure in the house.
As a point of interest, modern medicine promotes genetic weaknesses. How? It saves the lives of children and young people with genetic defects, who then grow up and breed children of their own who often carry the same defects. I do NOT say let them die, but I do call attention to what is happening, sub rosa.
We are already living in an era where eugenics is applied on a massive scale. It’s called “genetic testing” and “a woman’s right to choose”.
When you get right down to it, there is no such thing as basic human “rights.” The “rights” you have are determined solely by the society in which you live.
Cave men didn’t have the right to do as they pleased; if it pleased them to sit back on their laurels and relax, they starved, or froze. If it pleased them to stroll across a verdent, rich valley, unknowingly being watched by current inhabitants bent on sole posession of it, they were slaughtered.
How can anyone believe there is such a thing as basic human “rights?” Now, I don’t want to live in that kind of world any more than the next guy, but truthfully, the only “rights” you and I have that cave men did not have were the ones given to us by the society in which we live.
If I were to be slaughtered by someone who acted upon his primal urge to kill me for whatever reason, I’d still be dead, but he’d be hunted down, captured, and imprisoned at least, executed at most. For some, the idea that they will be imprisoned or executed for acting upon their primal urges is sufficient deterrant. That is why you have so-called “rights.”
The 1920s-30s were a time when the concepts of eugenics was widely accepted, fully supported by Winston Churchhill and others like him. Because we necessarily must make decisions as a function of our genetic make-up, upbringing, and the circumstances of our existence, allowing unbridled natality to people uncapable of understanding why they make the negative decisions they make has resulted in the world’s population doubling every 40 years and in unsustainable debt, use of resources, etc. The few, like Tesla, who have contributed to the well-being of humanity are being rapidly drowned by a sea of multiplying humanity whose proliferation is no longer limited by food availability or predators and so multiply as would mice or roaches under the same circumstances. Our pre-frontal cortexes are totally under the thumb of our reptilian brains and Matt Novak simply wants this to continue until we wipe ourselves out along with most other multicellular species on this planet.
Why does anyone think they have the right to decide who has the right to live and who doesn’t?
Do these people think the Nazis were right?
What are the criteria for deciding this? Who decides on the criteria and why? Do you start an agency that looks out for the developmentally disabled and “terminates” them? Are doctors required to terminate these children at birth?
Are you free of wrongdoing? Shall we terminate most of the poor? Would there be a colour bias?
Once the State grants itself these powers, you will end with absolutism and totalitarianism.
That’s the thing David. Some people seem to believe that poverty and social circumstances are a genetic defect. They further believe that they (or some group they like/trust) are some how able to overcome the same human failings the rest of us are born with, so that they can make the “proper” choice as to who can and who can not live.
In most cases, the criteria for making such choices usually gets down to “people who do not look/live like us”. While that’s certainly in keeping with the affinity for xenophobia that humans carry in their DNA, it’s hardly the scientifically enlightened response its proponents claim it is. It’s the reptilian brain trying to masquerade as the neo-cortex.
@Susan – I’ll just go ahead and assume that you’re trolling everyone with those statements… his achievements stand in the patent record, visible to all who can read (unlike you, apparently)
@Chris L – Eugenics was dangerously popular in the 30′s alright… just look at Henry Ford’s behavior back then. Hitler actually based his concentration camps on Ford’s assembly lines (with help from Henry himself)… and Ford’s factories were inspired by the operations of slaughterhouses of the time. Pretty creepy when you think about it (and I’m not kidding, it’s true). As for Tesla, he was a straight up one-of-a-kind uber-genius – the kind that only pops up every couple of centuries like Archimedes or Leonardo Divinci. He was, however, also a pretty messed up dude, with all sorts of mental illnesses such as severe OCD, synesthesia, and maybe even a touch of Autism or schizophrenia. He couldn’t relate to people that well, so I find it easy to believe someone with super logic powers but not very good social/emotional skills would LOVE the idea of streamlining our genetic code for maximum efficiency. Living proof that good and evil, or correctness and incorrectness, are both parts of every person. On a side note, it wasn’t the progressives who carried out Eugenics on a national scale in the Reich… it was Conservatives. Nazis were right-wing Christian Conservatives, and if you don’t believe me just go pick up some history books at the library (internet has too much pseudo-history garbage clogging it)
I think it is obvious in that those in the comments for eugenics are sheltered liberals who don’t know anyone outside of their own bubble of reality. Eugenics is abominable and just plain evil.
And that other commenter was right about abortion, it’s the same thing. Now women have the “right to choose” whether or not a baby gets to live or die. Liberals have a long track record of presuming to be God over life and death.
It’s amazing how people who claim to be of “progress” seem to only care about progress for themselves.
What if we decide to prevent criminals from having children and manage to do so successfully. What then? The possibility exists that even if we are correct and we are saving the life of many as a result of not allowing criminals to produce as they may go out and commit mass murders, that one of those mass murders will be of a child. That may seem terrible, but what if that child would have otherwise grown up to be responsible for events that lead up to a global nuclear war?. It’s entirely possible that saving a life may have more devastating consequences than we know. It’s entirely possible that saving a life could have positive consequences, we just don’t know. Does that mean we shouldn’t try? Maybe, maybe not.
The thing is, everyone makes choices everyday which could have devastating consequences that seem extremely innocent. Maybe a child buys a number 2 pencil from another kid to take a test. The kid uses the money and gets the idea that he will use that money to buy more pencils, then he expands into buying books, materials, snacks and whatever else he can make money from. He later starts using that money on drugs financing another major player in the drug industry. The drug industry then expands but lacking the ability to grow without becoming a larger target, they move to other crimes first until they have the firepower to expand, so they move into identity theft. They steal someone’s identity who resorts to working for another mob as a consequence of being financially broke and desperate, and that over time leads to growth which results in a clash of the two gangs. A schoolbus is caught in the crossfire and one of the kids that dies would have otherwise grown up to negotiate a peace agreement. Instead the replacement is unable to. The events escalate into a global nuclear war all because some kid forgot his #2 pencil, and the nation is later taken over by the mobs.
Personally, I believe that a healthy society is like a healthy individual who is composed of multiple working systems which is composed of multiple organs which is composed of multiple amounts of skin tissue, which is composed of multiple individual cells, all working harmoniously together. An unhealthy body is one where the cells attack each other like an autoimmune disorder or cancer, and uses the other cells and leach off their own reproductive abilities to produce cancerous cells or cells that attack each other. They look at themselves as independent from the whole rather than “one body” and rather than trusting each other and working based off of trust. The world is NOT working as “one body” and there is no synergy between the individual parts to create a sum greater than the whole when we are trying to control. Then again, perhaps that form of control is the same regulatory function that goes on in a healthy cell. It’s difficult to say if that function is behaving properly or not or if it even possesses the ability to make those kind of judgements. Perhaps it’s best if we are all allowed to make actions and nature will self correct if we allow it to run it’s course. Or perhaps learning about our ability to influence the future through decisions is a very part of that “control” needed to achieve eventual long lasting harmony and peace as a positive side effect.
One word: Golgafrincham.
Eugenics is now practiced via selective abortion based on genetic testing of the fetus and parents. In the future the entire genome of an in-vitro-fertilized embryo or in-vivo fetus will be analyzable on a routine basis prior to implantation or continued gestation. Selective implantation of healthy embryos will result in less heritable diseases and more desirable traits with a favorable cost to benefit ratio to society. However, in a truly free society the decision should be that of the parents alone. Even if a heritable disease is selected.
I think the article emphasises a very important point – that pressing historic figures into a black & white scheme of good and evil is misleading. Even Mother Theresa had her shady sides and Edison was a clever guy (and made some neat comments on religion).
The discussion on eugenics is just saddening – you are denying people their right to have children because of arbitrary criteria. It may come as a surprise, but until now, what we know about genetics factoring into intelligence is limited to a few mental retardation syndromes. Matter of fact, we do not even have a clear definition of intelligence. Nor is there a problem with overcrowding or resources on a global scale (only an unequal distribution of them) – so Malthus predictions wont come true any time soon (although, referring back to the black & white scheme, I’m sure the fellow had some bright ideas).
What about Stephen Hawking? If the eugenicists had total control, would we be the beneficiary of his expansive intellect, or just the pretty and handsome scientists?
Am I wrong in suspecting the subtle distinction between “eugenics” and “population control” has been overlooked in this thread? Eugenics is defined as the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Population control is more simply defined as control over the growth of a population. It sounds as though a great many posters agree with population control, mistakenly thinking they are talking about eugenics.
At 51 years old, I have come to know that, without a doubt, it is perseverance and a work ethic that is a greater determinant of productivity and success than intellect. To eliminate individuals from the gene pool based on intellect would not make the country more productive. However, to eliminate individuals who steadfastly refuse to contribute positively to society or cannot contribute to society would go a long way in improving our society. Even mentally challenged individuals can contribute if they choose, and very often they perform jobs that are mundane and might go unfilled, were our population composed only of “intellectually superior” individuals.
If the encouraged prevention of pregnancies by mothers already too poor to care for children they have, by bribes of free college or other benefits is eugenics then I’m pro eugenics. Many poor women today are encouraged to have babies by getting more benefits for every one. We could turn this around and reward behavior that is beneficial to our society and not reward that which is destructive. That young woman, getting ahead before she got caught up in surviving day to day, would one day maybe make a great mother.
I don’t confuse the word eugenics with holocaust. Not allowing a convicted lifer to have more kids through his conjugal visits is not a holocaust.
The huge cosmic joke of Tesla’s position on this issue’s he’s got things back to front.
He speaks of pity interfering with Nature’s ruthlessness and therefore the need for this to be corrected.
But according to this vision if Nature had her way nerds and other people like Tesla’d be eliminated precisely because stronger less reflective more vicious jock types’d wipe his kind out.
And in fact in many ways this was exactly Tesla’s fate that for all his brilliance far less intelligent but far more ruthless men used him up and tossed him away like a used tissue.
To all pro eugenics. I guess you dont know what you are talking about. Just look at the differences between european society an sociaties like classic India. Lateer knew a stop in development for ages due to the kaste system.
In short in a society where the elite controls, only one thing will happen: nothing. Because the elite will do what they always do: protecting their interest. Only with eugenics they have the tools do it effectivly…
I wish the article would have gone into detail about what criteria Tesla was considering for this.
I don’t see what the big deal is. Tesla wasn’t advocating for genocide or for killing anyone, but rather preventing the dim-witted from having children. Anyone who lives in the hood can tell you what happens when shallow, uncivilized, stupid people breed. If we had listened to him, we’d never have had to suffer with FOX News and reality TV.
Did you know that Tesla underwent a vasectomy. And he had no descendants. He lived what he preached. After all look at TV. It tells us who is and who is not okay. Who is handsome and successful and who is not. How much money you have determines the number of offspring that you can have in the civilized world…
“…no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny.”
—I’ll go along with that.
Except for Kevin S ALL commentators on here are TOTAL IDIOTS who are babbling about PATHETIC population “solutions” for a more than stupid agricultural system which is ALREADY DEAD! Keep going on your senseless and priggish chit-chat. You ALL are gonna get EXACTLY what’s coming to ya, and you well DESERVE IT, you LIFELESS FREAKS!
A lot of conflating of discordant ideas going on here. The Holocaust was among the worst crimes in history… but it is to the idea of eugenics as the crimes of the French Revolution are to the idea of self-determination. In short, one should not conflate an insane, skewed implementation of the idea with the underlying idea itself.
One also should not conflate poverty with genetics. I personally know a lot of smart, successful, healthy people who come from poor or troubled backgrounds. Clearly one’s reproductive rights shouldn’t be limited simply on the basis of some arbitrary economic (or even scholastic) success. And as a gay man, I’m all too aware that what society says is OK now might have been grounds for sterilization 100 (or 10) years ago — there is a classic problem of “who decides” and “what are the criteria”.
But with all that said, it’s clear that medical science is allowing people to survive, and reproduce, who previously would have died due to genetic problems — everything from predispositions to diabetes and cancer to degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s. On an individual level, it’s fantastic that these people get to live and continue to lead useful, enjoyable lives. But on a societal level, at some point we do need to ask — and it is valid to ask — whether there is a downside to letting these genetic traits not only live on but spread.
because without tezla and fascists, every human being would choose to procreate with someone who is criminally insane or otherwise mentally ill
Headline of this article: “Nikola Tesla the Eugenicist: Eliminating Undesirables by 2100″. The title its self is written on a way that suggest that Nikola Tesla was advocate of killing (eliminating) undesirables by 2100 by which he is compared with Nazis. None of that is stated in article from Liberty magazine and it is completely opposite with previously stated opinions of Nikola Tesla about human kind and future of human kind. There are a lot of polemics about authenticity of this part of the article. The sole goal of this article is to slammed life and work of Nikola Tesla. Again the real question is why Smithsonian, why it starts this campaign now, and by what purpose? Maybe because the real truth is increasingly being exposed about Tomas Edison (i.e. GE), J.P. Morgan, Rockefellers etc. Who runs USA today, UN, NATO etc. Why we never read something about these people and their companies which still exists today and which are also the most powerful in US and globally and on which expense.
Why is OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) being made the same degree of unfitness as serial killers/sadists??????
Did you not leave these black and white distinctions behind when you left first grade??
The world is shades of gray. Why is Tesla in the same category as a murderer? What is so wrong about not wanting a serial killer to father children???
When are you simpletons going to grow up?
Nikola Tesla was too engrossed in the times to see that a society cannot rightly sterilize anyone. Eugenics hasn’t been treated with respect, usually because the application is wrong and the world is ignorant. Alternative theories lead to hypocritical ad-hoc emotive reactions which often state that eugenicists should be killed instead. If you let stories of history’s villains scare you out of defending your right to be free from all types of exasperation and mass economic waste, your letting their evil spill even further than they had intended. Causes are important, be they internal (reason) or external (bodily). We want better conditions, and we could vote for official discouragement of breeding by people with serious physical malformations and certain congenital diseases.
I think some deeper fact checking is needed here. The article could have been “edited” / rewritten and Tesla’s name kept on it to bolster the eugenics movement.
On the subject of eugenics, the people that REALLY need to be weeded out from the gene pool are pedophiles and psychopaths.
But sterilization is for wimps.
If you believe a person is “defective” enough to sterilize, you should be man enough to shoot them in the head and be done with it.
I think that the only people defective enough for this rough treatment are the pedos and psychopaths who destroy the lives of others. It is only fitting that their own lives should be forfeit as a result.
This really comes down to the two camps. The Individualist camp, and the Collectivist camp. The Individualist believes that he has a right to determine his own future and life in a society of fellow Sovereign men and women, as long as he does no harm to another. The Collectivist believes the mass of people has the right to determine how the individual within a society lives, and that the mass is the Sovereign.
We already have history to show us what happens when the collectivists determine a man’s future. We have the twin monsters of National Socialism and International Socialism with their millions of victims to show us which philosophy is correct -Collectivism or Individualism. It comes down to this simple question: Do you own yourself, or does some government, corporation or religion own you (body, mind)?
Susan,
You are wrong about Tesla. Your research is flawed. Probably from an Edison or Westinghouse record. Check many sources. Karlsruhe Institute for one.
It doesn’t matter what you think; Alea jacta est.
The Death Panels will evolve into the Eugenics Board.
If you don’t believe this, you haven’t seen how every government program evolves into something it wasn’t meant to be. Originally the Death Panels were meant to ration health services to old people. Before Obamacare, Medicare rationed by a set formula. They think that rationally, Mickey Mantle should never have got that kidney. So the Death Panels will decide NOW. Ten years down the road, they will move into Eugenics.
A slightly related bit recently in the news: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/15/research-suggests-humans-are-evolving-to-be-dumber/
@ Kevin S — Do YOU know what the acronym NAZI means?
Think about it.
It is notorious that Eugenia cause genetic impoverishment but how evolving in a society contaminated with bad character? The Utopia of Tesla, Darwin and even Malcolm X, among others, leads us to the perfect world, without big felonies et cetera, but -it seems, there is only evolution in pain, see Schopenhauer …
While the choice to describe both sides of the argument is admirable, the quality of the writing in this article falls far short of the standard expected by Smithsonian supporters and readers. This writer appears to be performing a poor quality stand-up comedy routine, rather than writing an article for adults to read and consider. Tesla is an interesting character and we deserve better articles about him and his life.
The level of the comments on the Tesla article is generally disappointing. No one who commented seems to have expert knowledge in genetics, yet those who support eugenics are willing to deprive individuals of the right to reproduce without knowing whether it is possible to predict genetic outcomes. I’m not an expert, but from general reading I believe that this is very hard to do and most predictions are probabilistic. The probability of a defect being transmitted to an offspring depends on both parents. Combine this with the very considerable difficulty of defining defects that merit interfering with reproductive rights and eugenics become a very dicey proposition.
For those who want to slow population growth, try combing increased wealth with free contraception for women and the growth curve will start to go down.
For those who want to sterilize pedophiles and murderers, what about those who reproduce before they are caught and the very large number who are never caught? In the United States, those who are caught don’t get conjugal visits.
Bottom line. There are no simple solutions to difficult and complex problems. Furthermore, no one has pointed to any accepted scientific evidence tending to show that the human gene pool has been or is being degraded. All I have read are personal conclusions that seem to be more the result of personal prejudices than of scientific evidence.
If we were only animals with all that we are residing in our bodies, it might make sense. And, if criminality were passed down genetically, it would also. However, neither is the case. And, where would it end? With only the tall, blonde, dull people allowed to breed?
Now this sheltered liberal is very confused. I’m so evil I’m suppose to be for eugenics and so stupid that I shouldn’t have the right to decide things about my own body?
Nonsense is rife on this board.
Thank you for the insightful article. Perhaps Mr. Tesla’s theory on eugenics is the the product of self loathing, frustration and his intellect. As the author noted, Tesla himself suffered from mental illness. He also suffered from never achieving the type of standing in society that Edison, Marconi or Westinghouse achieved. And, with recent advances in mapping the human genome, and genetic manipulation, it seems without some guidance, wisdom and compassion, humanity may indeed be headed towards a system of eugenics.
I have been fascinated by Tesla for years, and feel there may be more to learn about science and the future of the human civilization by, as the author states, we consider both the genius and the man.
Thank you for this insight into Tesla – like so many people, I always thought he was pretty cool and underrated, though perhaps because of people like me he’s become slightly too overrated.
Unfortunately, eugenics seems to have been fairly en vogue in the 20s and 30s, especially amongst those with a mind towards social reform, touted as a way to alleviate the issues surrounding poverty rather than as a punishment for being a certain race/class.
However, I think MODERN proponents of eugenics would have a bit more common sense. Stopping people of a certain race, class, or mental/criminal status from having children is not going to solve the ills of the world and unnecessarily stigmatizes certain people by denying them something that is a human right. What we need to focus on is stopping things like the cycle of poverty or institutionalization through education, reform of the prison system, etc.
There is NOTHING in print aside from this supposed 1935 Liberty article that would suggest that Tesla advocated eugenics. This is simply slanderous to Tesla’s name. Through his experiments with free energy he wanted to better humanity as a whole. His spiritual views were that of a mystic’s, not of someone who condoned the killing of undesirables. This quote captures Tesla’s true essence and spirit:
“This new world must be a world in which there shall be no exploitation of the weak by the strong, of the good by the evil; where there will be no humiliation of the poor by the violence of the rich; where the products of intellect, science and art will serve society for the betterment and beautification of life, and not the individuals for achieving wealth. This new world shall not be a world of the downtrodden and humiliated, but of free men and women and free nations, equal in dignity and respect for Mankind and Nature.”
- Nikola Tesla
Two problems with this article:
1. Matthew Inman does not deify Tesla. In fact, he refers to Tesla in the webcomic you mention as both “brilliant” and “batshit insane.” Please try to get your facts straight.
2. Any area involving human sexuality is less in the area of “brilliant” and more in the area of “batshit insane” in terms of the divisions of Tesla’s mental workings. He never achieved nor pretended to achieve expertise in human psychology or sexuality. He was a lifelong celibate by choice, believing that giving in to his carnal urges would drain his energy and distract him from his work. He also had what we would today characterize as severe OCD.
Tesla was a brilliant man, whose work in the area of electical theory and engineering was not only ahead of his time, but in many cases ahead of our own. This caused people to ask his opinion on matters outside his area of expertise, and certain of his obsessions sometimes compelled him to answer them with an answer other than “Why are you asking me about that? I’m a scientist specializing in electromagnetism, not an evolutionary biologist or sex therapist!”
Slandering a dead man is hardly worthy of you, nor of this blog.
Presumably innocent is a principle of US and all modern legal systems yet the author of this blog denies Tesla this right. So does Smithsonian. How interesting that no other copy of this alleged article exists, and the content of this article is absolutely the opposite of what Tesla said, wrote and confessed. Also interesting this alleged article only ‘surfaced’ after all died who could have proven it wrong and a fraud. Nikola Tesla was a true genious serving mankind, and if you look through history real geniuses without exception were humanists–irrespective of nationality and historical circumstances.
Lets not forget that the proponents of the “pure race of humans” led to the gas chambers people who were their superior in every way (Jews), and were responsible for inflicting death and destruction on 50 million Europeans.
Mankind ma eventually be destroyed by its “geniuses”. Hiroshama certainly was. Maybe we need more “special needs” types. Like my beautiful daughter who is the love of all who know her.
The notion of eugenics is based on the principle that selective breeding will result in a better adapted human product than natural selection (including sexual selection) would. But there are reasons to doubt this. There are often unwanted and unintended consequences of artificial selection, mainly because it is very difficult to anticipate and evaluate the adaptive fitness of each and every trait (actual and desired) to unknown future circumstances. Let us say that we don’t want criminal aggressiveness in human beings. Selectively eliminating this trait is probably possible, if the history of animal domestication is any indication. But such a selective breeding program may have unknown maladaptive consequences. Perhaps some small measure of genetically programmed inclination to aggressiveness is beneficial to our species in many unforeseen ways: perhaps it makes us better (i.e. more protective) parents; perhaps it drives the restlessness that makes artists more creative; perhaps it fuels the emotion of indignation at the heart of our moral impulses. Perhaps in some dystopian future of eugenics the selectors will find it necessary to periodically inject a criminal’s genes into the human gene pool to make us better adapted to our world — in the same way breeders of sled dogs may sometimes inject wolf genes into the gene pool of these domestic animals. Natural selection has been at work on human beings for a very long time, making us extraordinarily multivalent. Our multivalence has enhanced our fitness to a changing world. We interfere with nature’s winning formula, perfected over a very long time, to our own peril.
It is probably true that for the last several generations the advanced industrial world has pushed dysgenic welfare policies — incentivizing lower-IQ, less productive and more criminally inclined populations to have a higher fertility rate than more intelligent, law-abiding groups. But the obvious point is that this dysgenic trend is, in the not so long run, self-correcting. A society of welfare-dependent takers can’t long sustain a generous social welfare system. The sudden demographic explosion of less intelligent and less industrious groups in the modern welfare state will soon enough be followed by mass hunger and a reduced fertility rate. Intelligence and forethought will once again have their natural rewards.
“An asexual man with severe OCD talking of what he names ‘undesirables’ or ‘eugenically unfit’ certainly rings as hypocrisy, I agree.”
Are some of you suggesting that there is something wrong or broken in asexuals?
This issue of eugenics is extremely complex. I really doubt that Tesla had a similar view of this as the way it was manifested with the Nazi influence. The truth is that humans are definitely doing something wrong because we are grossly overpopulated and can’t sustain what we have physically created on this planet. What is also true is that we have a very poor ability to judge what weakness is within the human race. Psychology and the judgement on mental illness or the sanity of individuals is still very subjective and based on ‘fad’ thinking. We may call someone mentally ill because they don’t fit in with the current norms of society but this doesn’t mean they are weak or somehow destructive to the genetics of the human race.
Tesla was definitely a remarkable man and yes, he was just a man so he made mistakes. I also think that our interpretation of his ideas on this matter may be greatly flawed and that we don’t fully understand what he was really talking about here.
There has to be a humane way to control our breeding and gross overpopulation. We are doing it wrong by believing we are all entitled to baring children. We are also wrong in thinking that this can be solved by psychological judgement.
I wonder why Tesla decided that he would not have any children.
Historically, the eugenics movement of the first half of the 20th century was an over-reaction to the emergence of the convergence between Darwinism and the then new science of genetics. At one and the same time, it gave too much credit to the research of the time and had too little faith that this research would become more sophisticated as it developed. As a result, the problem with eugenics (other than its inherent immorality) is that it is a blunt instrument open to all sorts of abuse. The worst such abuse is that it balances nature vs. nurture by ignoring nurture. Would the offspring of an intelligent habitual criminal necessarily turn to crime? Would the offspring of the malnourished and poorly cared for be poor specimens if brought up in a more supportive environment? Is all mental illness the product of inherited traits? Do no therapies ever work? In a less than perfect world, those in power would be enforcing eugenic principles to cover up defects in the treatment of their own people and their ignorance of the role of inheritance. Add to this the progress in understanding and treating genetic defects and you will, by the year 2100, have very few people who could legitimately be denied the right to reproduce.
Good or bad Tesla’s prediction about eugenics establishment by year 2100 probably will be fulfilled. With the advancements in gene decoding and DNA manipulation some kind of eugenics is unavoidable.
@guthrie I’ve chosen not to procreate because I have too many diseases. Why should I pass along those genes to an innocent child, only to watch it live a life of chronic illness? Wouldn’t my decision to have a child be selfish and not thinking of the child’s quality of life?
If one steps back from the emotional aspect to all this, if chronically ill people stopped having children, chronic illness could easily be eliminated. It sickens me when I see people with serious health issues decide to have a child–you’re not doing that child any favors. Eugenics was practiced in the U.S. in the early 20th century. And there’s no reason for it to resemble the Third Reich–health people could be given an incentive to have children, and the chronically ill could be given an incentive not to have children. And would having the possibility of letting a severely retarded individual having a child which he or she had no way of understanding or caring for be any more moral or empathetic than not letting that person have a child and risk putting a child in a dangerous situation?
Tesla was on the right track. Mankind operates outside the rules of natural selection–we save the weak and the ill, and we have consequences because of that. There aren’t too many wild animals with chronic diseases–they get eaten up pretty quickly. (Look at how unhealthy some breeds of dogs are…) I don’t know if Tesla said this about eugenics, as I don’t remember it being in the Cheney biography, but it is possible he said this, given the wilder things he was saying towards the end of his life. Even so, the man was a genius, and his contributions to science aren’t well known to the American populace because they are so stuck on the myth of Edison.
The statements at the beginning of the quote/misquote provide the framework for the conclusions regarding eugenics. The world societies had just begun the major technological advances that reversed physical evolution. Of course, it those times, few could envision a future where physical fitness would be irrelevant – it did, indeed, appear that man was devolving in a very negative way.
It should also be noted that we have not yet made it to the year 2100. While sterilization and prohibitions against breeding by the unfit may not be necessary, it is not at all unlikely that “defective” physical or mental conditions will be “corrected” by genetic engineering within the next two or three generations. It is not even inconceivable to me that the failure to do so will be made illegal, tantamount to child abuse. The advances in the knowledge regarding the human genome in just the past few years have been astounding. The use of genetic modification in agriculture haqs been frightening. The Tessla, or whoever wrote the statements quoted may be proven right as to the genetic “putity” of our descendants in the 22nd century.
Sooo…we would be minus our Steven Hawkings? What a limited imagination. Also, what a limited concept of evolution. The introduction of chaos into ordered populations allows for the mutation and the growth of new, exciting forms of life.
Ok ok.. We got it.. Let’s “discover” new truth about Tesla so Edison seems to be the greatest.. That is so Nazi type propaganda but people already know that Smithsonian is tend to do such a things in favor of lovely humanist Edison :))
Real joke of article in my opinion.. Would be nice if author give us some reference or quote his source of this “discovered” aka propagandized information.
The answer to the eugenics problem has already been stated many times, education. Studies have shown that the more educated a society is, the fewer children they have. With fewer children, hopefully this also means, fewer living in poverty or in undesirable conditions. More resources can be used to help those who need assistance such as the elderly. Obviously someone like Stephen Hawking should never be seen as being inferior because his intellectual contributions far exceed his physical shortcomings. The same could be said for Tesla. If we look at how individuals can contribute to society, we can determine their worth. Our education system should reflect this goal of producing citizens that contribute. We might aspire to this goal but presently we are clearly not putting enough resources toward it.
@nenad: Facts. Tesla was born in Croatia. So, he is croatian with serbian roots. Also you should really look what he said about his nationality. You serbs really have many complexes, especially connected to nationalizm. He didn’t care about that nazi shit. Nazis care about that shit.