Customer Reviews

Apes Men and Morons (Essay Index Reprint Series)

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Published in 1937 -- the year before Hilter's annexation of the Sudetenland -- Earnest Albert Hooton's "Apes, Men, and Morons" is an example of the then fashionable notion that the human race can save itself only by enacting aggressive measures to promote selective breeding.

From a review in AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH May, 1938:

"The last chapter sums up what we must do to be saved. The author recognizes that there are many gaps in our knowledge of human biology and that we do not know enough to breed geniuses, but is firm in his opinion that we must bring about a 'sit-down reproductive strike of the busy breeders among the morons, criminals, and social ineffectuals of our population.' He holds that a biological purge is the essential prerequisite for a social and spiritual salvation. 'We must stop trying to cure malignant biological growths with patent sociological nostrums. The emergency demands a surgical operation.' "

Beyond the obvious arrogance of such a position (there is little doubt Hooton considered himself and his progeny exempt from the "surgical operation" he calls for), Hooten says nothing as to whom should be entrusted with the power to identify the "social ineffectuals" among us who comprise the "malignant biological growth" to be purged.

Worse, Hooten's endorsement of the very arguments Hitler was at that very moment using to justify the killing thousands of innocent German civilians clearly indicates socially ineffectual thinking. By Hooten's own logic then, he is himself guilty of social inefficacy, and therefore worthy of purging. Oh the irony.

As perfect an example of comfortable, privileged, American armchair Nazism as can be found.

The great and venerable Alfred Korzybsky ( Founder of the Institute of General Semantics ) recommends this book in his monumental and masterful work; "SCIENCE AND SANITY". He recommends this book ( and several others ) in order to allow the reader a chance to thoroughly grasp the FACT that an Aristotelian-based "Either / Or - "Is / Isn't" education system produces human-harmful, brutalizing, macroscopically-generalizing mind sets which automatically generate "Fuhrer's" in the fields of education, medicine, publishing media, politics, and sciences, who fancy themselves as representing ( and speaking for ) ALL members of the human world. Such delusional, mind-bombed patsies routinely become responsible for trends that are destructive to human culture and cause "cultural LAG" which degenerates societies into conditions of lower and lower standards.
Read this book and then read and re-read and re-read again Korzybsky's "Science and Sanity" and "Manhood for Humanity". Do so and get woken up out of the stupor your mind exists in presently.