The Political Hat

     A “thought experiment” from two psychology professors have come to the conclusion that the way to utopia lies in taking babies away from mothers the moment they are born and then substituting a mother’s own child with a substitute.

     Herein below, is a fisking that article, “If babies were randomly allocated to families would racism end.”

“Imagine a world in which all the babies born each day were randomly redistributed among the biological parents. The infant assigned to any given set of parents could be white, black, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, or any combination thereof (and that’s just the US); the baby could be perfectly healthy or grossly deformed. Parents would know only that their child was not their biological child. Let us call this social mixing.

“Is the idea so frightening? Yes it is. It is a frightening thought that your own biological child, the one sitting there now doing her homework, might have gone to an impoverished mother or a drug addict, perhaps have been beaten, perhaps starved. But why, save for genetic chauvinism, do we view with comparative equanimity the everyday reality of other people’s children subject to the same treatment by their own biological mothers?”

     Could it be that we as a species evolved by concentrating our resources on our genetic offspring because we are genetically programmed to pass on our genes and insure that they are passed on thereafter, due to the simple fact that those that didn’t had their lineages go extinct.

“You may argue that genetic bias is indelible in human nature. Social mixing would not only disturb the comfort of this fatalistic attitude, but also use genetic chauvinism for ends beyond mere economic equality, providing grounds for a compassion that goes beyond the well being of our immediate families. Since any man might be your biological brother, any woman your biological sister, concern for them would have to be expressed by a concern for a common good.”

     Or perhaps people won’t care because regardless of how they treat the child they are given, their own kid won’t be effected. Heck, if you can’t even raise your own kid, why bother having kids to begin with? Sure, adoptive parents care, but they are not having their own children taken away in order to adopt.

” A second effect of social mixing would be to generate a strong interest in the health and wellbeing of expectant mothers, which would ultimately translate into an interest in the social and biological welfare of everyone. Since any child might end up our own, we would provide the social and educational environments that would best enhance their development. Ghettos and slums would be an eyesore for us all. Poverty, drug, and alcohol addiction are already everyone’s problem, but this fact would be more meaningful than it is now. The child of that addict might be our biological child. Every victim of a drive-by shooting might be a member of our genetic family. Each of us would see the link between our fate and the fate of others.”

     On the contrary, it would mean mothers have every incentive to make to make maternal care worse for everyone else so that their own flesh and blood will be better off.

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