The Benefits of Degeneracy

Chapter 1. The Decline of Modern Man

One of the most widespread concerns among the intellectual classes of the present period is that of the decline of the race, and to remedy this decline they demand innumerable social laws every day to monitor our whole life and our every action. Work in general, and work of women and children especially—the draining of swamps, the reconstruction of streets, their extensions, and the demolishing of the cities; upbringing, education, and the punishments inflicted on children; births, deaths, marriages; food and drink we have and even the air that we breathe, everything. In dread of decline, one must submit to regulations.¹

Now is precisely this greatly feared decline, which is always spoken about vaguely, rather more like an impalpable, menacing scarecrow than like a real and precious thing, that I intend to treat in this brief study—on its essence—on its individual and social consequences—on its harms and advantages inferred—to see, then, if all of these concerns and these laws are useful or harmful.

To do this, it is necessary to start from the description of past generations from which we have declined, and compare it with ours. Unfortunately, the information that we possess regarding the vital functions of our ancestors is too scarce to allow for an exact and decisive comparison between us and them. A substitute, however, remains, one that the most recent discoveries have duly substantiated: the study of the still savage populations living in Asia, America, Africa, and Oceania, which represent, according to the most modern research, the various aspects of primitive men. I have therefore permitted myself to turn to this sweeping and general comparison, to our forgotten contemporary brothers, who, spared the whirlwind that has continually shaken and forcibly reshaped our white race, preserve, same as the animals in the placid marine depths, the ancient mode of being, feeling, and behaving as our distant fathers, just as mother earth simultaneously conserves interred bodies alongside forests and animals. [ . . . ]

Mental Decline

Nor is the decline of the race limited to the body; this has also attacked the psychic, moral and intellectual field with as much vigor, the number of the insane, criminals, suicides being in terrible increase, all of whom are most rare among the savages and whom my father demonstrated to be much less frequent even in ancient times.²

In Sweden,³ which has figures on suicides that rose in the last century, one can attest that from 1749 to 1800 there were no more than ten suicides in a million inhabitants, while in the period from 1870 to 1880 the number increased by six-fold, nearly reaching an average of 80 out of 1,000,000.

Prussia, which can supply figures gathered in 1848, has seen its suicides double in these 50 years from 70 in 1,000,000 inhabitants in 1816 to 133 in 1871.⁴

In Austria, the proportion tripled from the beginning to the end of the past century; in Italy, it doubled from 1864 to 1878. This can be said of all the other civilized countries.

Civilization, notwithstanding all of its abundant pleasures, cannot contain this intense and absurd desire to abandon life before due time, which develops in brains exhausted by work and by pleasure, struck by the deepest and purest spring of every delight: mental equilibrium. Suicides are considered by psychiatrists to be insane, and sure enough the proportion of the insane has been growing in accordance with the number of suicides; but the figures with regards [to the insane] are much more difficult to collect, because they are too confusing, uncertain and multifarious to be suitable as an exact and detailed classification, as is the way in which one presents this terrible woodworm of the brain.

However, official statistics of the realm register an increase in the insane in Italy; they grew from 51 in 10,000 inhabitants in 1874, to 74 in 10,000 in 1888; there is an analogous proportion of increase in England, though far beyond where the starting point was [in Italy], concerning a country [unified] for a longer time and more diffusely civilized. In England, they had 186 insane in 10,000 sane in 1859; they counted 290 in 10,000 in the year 1893.⁵

In Australia, they counted 287 insane in 10,000 inhabitants in 1884–87; in 1894–98 this had already risen to 312.

We have said that in England the proportion is greater because the country is more civilized. This is because this decline (except for certain forms found in nutrition, such as alcoholism and pellagra) was in reality a massacre nearly exclusive to the well-educated classes and among the most intelligent people.

According to Girard des Cailloux,⁶ in France there are:

Like the Tarpeian Rock that rises, menacing, near the Capitoline, this terrible decline chooses its victims from among those who have risen higher in degrees of vigor, from wealth and from intelligence.

If, therefore, the theory is true—and about this it seems there is no doubt—that the attributes of the savages are also attributed to our progenitors, from which rapid and hasty comparison we must resign ourselves to conclude that our race presents all the signs of an evident decline; that our muscles are made more feebly, that our resistance to heat, to cold, to fatigue, to fasting is quite diminished; that our digestive system is made more delicate, the sensitivity to pain more acute; that we are much more easily subjected to temporary illnesses, to deformations of the bones, to weakening of the senses; that, in a word, we are physically decayed.

But is this [issue] of decline a new phenomenon of the white race?

And is it, furthermore, so dangerous as generally considered? And if it is such, why has the bosom of this race submitted to the greatest massacre—the white race, which extended its dominion among all others so magnificently? This is the problem that I am positing and that I tried to resolve, broadening the research from the small modern human world to the whole living world, to plants, to animals, to prehistoric man.