Social Darwinism

This term first appeared in Europe in 1879, but was popularized in the United States in 1944. It draws upon the use of the term Darwinism, which refers to the theory of natural selection in which population is the outcome of the competition between individual organisms for limited resources. This means that the strongest or fittest should survive and flourish in society, while the weak and unfit should be allowed to die.

Because of Globalization, this problem has increased since everyone is competing to be better than the other ones, so in this way only the fittest one is the one who survive, which ends in numerous consequences.
The problem with Social Darwinism is its philosophy, since it makes the faulty assumption that what is natural is equivalent to what is morally correct, meaning that just because something takes place in nature, it must be a moral paradigm for humans to follow.
Social Darwinism was used to justify numerous exploits during history. For instance colonialism, which gave natives a weak image towards more developed societies; military actions, the strongest military would win; social context, it provided a justification for the more exploitative forms of capitalism in which workers were paid sometimes pennies a day for long hours of backbreaking labor; holocaust, applied by the Nazi party in Germany to justify their eugenics programs; and so on.

The most commonly known case up to date is the believe that the white race is superior to the black race, as well as to the Latin race; since white has always been a peace symbol as well as a pure color. Reason why the enormous gap between the white race and the black race exists until today.

Today, Social Darwinism is a significant problem since it is reflected in our environment. According to this theme, related with countries, United States would be the fittest and countries such as Peru, India, and so on, would be the weak ones. Because of Social Darwinism, countries whose economies were based on the United State’s economy are being directly influence by the Wall Street crash and this should not be a problem since it only should affect United States.

Social Darwinism is not only seen in countries as a whole, but also in the small businesses since they have the need to adapt to the strongest and biggest business in order to survive. If not they would simply disappeared because of their inferiority compared with those big business.

related links:

http://www.natvan.com/free-speech/fs9512a.html

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761579584/social_darwinism.html