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U.S. History 1877-Present Videos 173 videos
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U.S. History 1877-Present 3: Social Darwinism 1437 Views
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Description:
Today we're going to learn about Social Darwinism. Originally we were going to teach you about Antisocial Darwinism, but we couldn't get anyone to talk to us about it.
Transcript
- 00:04
while the anarchists and communists were definitely not okay
- 00:07
with the rise of industrial capitalism in the Gilded Age there were those who [anarchist and communist signs]
- 00:11
just didn't see the problem with it some of these people took a shine to a
- 00:15
philosophy called social Darwinism when we hear this term we sort of imagine a
- 00:20
bunch of Darwin lovers pleasantly chatting about evolution while eating [Darwin lovers appear]
Full Transcript
- 00:24
cucumber sandwiches and sipping tea but that's not what it's about
- 00:28
in fact social Darwinism was only loosely based on Charles Darwin's idea
- 00:32
of evolution well Darwin's theories tried to explain
- 00:35
how life-forms slowly evolves over long periods of time like millions of years [Life forms evolving]
- 00:40
like according to Darwin bugs that look like sticks are less likely to get eaten
- 00:46
than bugs that look like tasty bug dinners so bugs that look more like [Bug appears as steak on a plate]
- 00:51
sticks survive longer and are able to have more stick bug babies and post cute
- 00:56
stick bug baby videos on YouTube but social Darwinist took the idea that [Stick insect using iPhone on leaf]
- 01:01
animals with more advantageous traits were likely to survive and copied and
- 01:05
pasted it onto human social relations well the idea basically went like this
- 01:10
life is a ferocious battle to the death in the jungle and some genetically [Rabbits fighting]
- 01:15
inferior people are just bound to lose and it's just not the problem of the
- 01:20
people on top social Darwinist said that people were poor because they were not
- 01:24
as smart or not as good as rich people people were poor because they just
- 01:29
didn't have the skills to be rich or they just hadn't worked hard enough it [Poor man's head explodes]
- 01:34
was the perfect way to justify the huge gap that existed between the rich and
- 01:38
the poor during the Gilded Age picture the anarchists and the Communists
- 01:41
streaming statistics about labor and poverty while the social Darwinist shrug
- 01:46
and say well survival of the fittest bro one famous social Darwinist named [Man taking a bath surrounded by gold bars]
- 01:50
William Sumner published a famous pamphlet that summed up a lot of these
- 01:54
ideas the title was on a new philosophy that poverty is the best policy well
- 02:01
it's not hard to imagine what the anarchists and communists thought of
- 02:04
that here's a quote that kind of sums up summoner's ideas one man in a free state
- 02:08
cannot claim help from and cannot be charged to
- 02:13
give help to another well Sumner thought that any kind of social welfare system [Poor man appears and government entitlement piggy bank handed to him]
- 02:18
help the poor was downright unnatural and bad for society if a rich person
- 02:23
wanted to help out the poor then that was his or her prerogative but when a
- 02:26
government starts putting into place programs that force this to happen and [IRS woman holding pile of cash appears]
- 02:30
society is in big trouble these days all we have to do is flip on the news to see
- 02:34
that people are still going at it over these issues on the one side people
- 02:38
argue that the wealthy of a duty to help the poor and that when wealth gets
- 02:41
concentrated at the top the rich fix the system so that it's next to impossible [Rich man throws barrels down to poor man]
- 02:45
for the lower classes to climb the social ladder and if you dig into the
- 02:50
news the real issue a lot of times it's just about the implementation of trying
- 02:54
to lift the lower classes up that is most of them aren't stupid they're just [Poor kids stood against a wall]
- 02:59
born into very difficult conditions and you don't have to fight some people
- 03:03
these days channel social Darwinists like some are arguing that helping the
- 03:07
poor actually hurts them why well because it encourages the poor not that
- 03:12
help themselves someone who's making the room and board and bunch of other things
- 03:16
for free well maybe that's okay if they just sort of stay where they are why
- 03:20
would somebody want to go out and get a job if the government gives them [Poor man inside a house]
- 03:23
everything they need and then of course there are people who argue that there's
- 03:27
a lot of middle ground between a complete welfare state and one that
- 03:30
offers no safety net at all we don't claim to know the secret answer here but
- 03:35
it's important to see how these kind of debates continues for the years chances
- 03:38
are that one day future schmoops will be talking about how things going on right [Shmoop robot talking to dolphin]
- 03:42
now affected whatever will be going on then we're just hoping that the perks of
- 03:46
working at future shmoop will include company hoverboard real ones not like [Man riding a hoverboard]
- 03:50
those fake ones of weak
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