Informant38

What I meant about Galton, why the paragraphs are red-fonted, was the naked intent expressed. You'd expect that intent to have disappeared from public view the closer it got to actualization. So it's a little far-fetched, and at the same time not likely to be too easy to see. Unlikely to be, and unlikely to be seen if it is.
One of the assumptions that hangs me up here is how clear the background is. A lingering sense that everybody else knows more about it than I do. But then why write? So the idea is writing toward something like an educative statement. Explication.
So here's a general outline:
In the US we think of slavery as a "southern" racist thing, and we think of it in strictly economic terms. So it's racist and economic. And it's got this aspect of force, violence, physical coercion. Without those terms and aspects we can't use the word slavery to describe a relationship. But what I'm talking about with Galton is as much domestication as it is enslavement. Because it isn't slavery, technically, if the slaves volunteer, if they submit willingly, if they can't see any alternative, or if the only alternative they can see is suffering and/or death. After a few generations of that, it just becomes how things are, a natural state. This explains some of the anti-evolution sentiment around, and its encouragement, because seeing that process, when you're in the middle of it, is pretty scary, and dysfunctional.
Slavery as it's defined now is in opposition to the way things are, it's distinguished by its contrast to what's normal - there's slavery, and here's things as they are. But the relationship Galton's after, and the relationship I'm trying to describe here, is older than money, it's deep in the biology of animate living. Using other forms of life to increase your likelihood of success. To get things done. Parasitic attachment, domestication, predator/prey, plain old everyday carnivorous behavior. It's the species aspect, doing it to your own kind, or what were your own kind, that makes it creepy. Slavery in that light is the beginning of separation, a species branching, splitting.
Seeing that purely as a racist economic gambit means being blind to it otherwise. What I'm trying to show here is something much bigger than simple racist slavery, or economic slavery, something closer to a parasitic infestation, a domestication process that leads to what's essentially a controlled intentional mutation, and if it's successful to a species differentiation like Wells' Morlocks and Eloi, in The Time Machine.
My overall stance isn't a moral one so much as it is a loyal one - loyalty to what's being tamed, to what it is, and was, in its wild state; and against what's doing the domestication, the breaking and control of that thing I can't, and don't want to learn how to, name.
Galton says, and this is a hundred years ago - what a wonderful opportunity for systematic research on human subjects the systemetized ranks of the school system present.
Galton is like Cortez there, like Balboa, Junipero Serra, like Kit Carson. He sticks out because he's early days. After a little while the territory's so crowded it takes exceptional attainment, or notoriety, to stick out. And, if this suspicion is accurate, the real successes of this inhuman research have had to be cataloged out of the public eye. So there's that.
General idea:
Organized ranks of children, with extensive records begun at birth - intelligence tests, behavioral analysis, submission to authority measured from year to year. And eventually, genetic patterns, correspondencies between relatives and localities. That's all available in the data with remote access. Access to specific subjects, especially for deep work, requires something closer to captivity.
Today's specific topic:
The use of drugs, especially marijuana, on the population bloom of American kids born between 1945 and 1960. Between say 1965 and 1980. Not that it's stopped since then. But like television, like Galton's eugenic lust for the ranked and cataloged children of the educational system, its infancy is where the raw intent's most visible, and where the potential of the device is most exposed.
I don't mean the use of the marijuana experience, I mean the use of the illegality of marijuana, and its ubiquity. What you need to imagine is the kids at the edge of the bell curve of intelligence and attitude. These would be dangerous and desirable to the kind of men Galton was spiritual heir to and that he sired spiritually, and the kind of thing those men would create in aggregate, what they are acting in concert.
Dangerous the way Che Guevara was dangerous, desirable the way the anonymous ronin that still flutter through the CIA back channels were desirable.
So you'd need a hook to get those kids, and busting them for what was an almost universal commodity was about as hard as a phone call. Pynchon's Vineland limns that relationship perfectly.
On a less intrigue-loaded plane, being able to harness the strongest threats in black street culture, by busting them for weed, makes it an effective gambit for general social control as well. Like most of the best eugenic tools, it works on a lot of levels and in a lot of crucial areas at once. And it works.
At the other end, this tangent - that down here in the future we have this little barrage of "Just say NO to drugs" messages, the constant anti-drug brainwashing of kids at school and in the media, and the distinct separation of "drugs" from "alcohol" in those messages; as though the presence of alcohol in the culture was for a different purpose than drugs.
This is all presented behind a shield of damaged lives, the image of harmed innocence being the ultimate protection scam - the protein-hoax that opens the cell interior to the virus. Automobile fatalities are the single greatest cause of death for people under 30 in the US, and that's been the case for decades.
You can't show someone on TV having a pleasant drug experience, let alone an illuminating one, though many of the best programs on TV were and are being written by people who've had illuminating drug experiences. The reason you can't show that is it gives kids the wrong message. Same with the naked female breast.
So we can assume that in the minds of the people making those prohibitions giving kids the message that driving a 400 horsepower SUV that gets 11 miles per gallon in four-wheel drive, tearing down a dirt road in some edenic wilderness is a good thing - is the right idea. Showing kids that message is giving them the right idea. Do this and be free.
Brief summary of today's topic:
There's a band of us, brothers and sisters, who were picked out of the lot for qualities we had in common that were rare otherwise. Testing high and off-scale, we were of value to something we were completely unprepared to recognize. Out of that auctioned lot there were those who co-operated and those who didn't, and those who compromised and those who resisted, and all the spectrum of possibilities in between. And like the seemingly bizarre but strategically practical and logical deployment of prohibition against something as innocuous as marijuana, those complicities and punishments are entirely behind the scenes, covered by stories that contain other stories, a cheap spook version of the Panchatantra.
I keep waking up to it, shaking with rage and terror, then something happens; then I wake up again. And sometimes I remember voices and hands that knew, clear eyes without guile; comfort and strength, and valor.
She picked me up in a pickup truck right over there on S_ R_ Avenue, and she said, while we were riding along, "They just keep pulling me in - it's like I have a fishhook stuck in my ass, and they can just pull me in whenever they want."
She's why I wrote this, trying to get to it, get all the way back down to it, past the fear. Back down to the real.