The moral continuation of Social Darwinism (the survival-of-the-holiest, the survival-of-the-most-virtuous)
This mutation is older than capitalism itself. Weber already saw how the Puritan conscience fused worldly success with inward righteousness, creating a moral Darwinism long before anyone coined the phrase. The secular world merely inherited the grammar. Taylor’s account of modern authenticity shows how this became an ethic of personal “self-responsibility,” and Rieff’s analysis of the therapeutic age shows how moral purity transmuted into psychological resilience. Thus in self-help, wellness optimization, stoic-influencer masculinity, and mindset culture, failure is the telltale mark of insufficient inner discipline. Sedgwick, Chen, and Puar trace how fragility and debility get recoded as spiritual or psychological lapses — the weak deserve their weakness because they could not maintain the proper “posture” toward life. The winners, naturally, win because they deserved to. Weber would simply recognize the old inquietude of salvation anxiety in new secular clothes.
The spiritual continuation
Some spiritual frameworks simply cosmologize the same logic. Arendt already warned about the privatization of suffering; Sontag showed how illness metaphors moralize misfortune. Contemporary critics like Sara Ahmed and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò show how this logic turns structural harm into an intimate failing of consciousness itself. Disability theorists like Garland-Thomson and Kafer have catalogued the evolutionary metaphors that haunt this terrain: to be disabled, chronically ill, traumatized, or depressed is to be spiritually “less evolved.” Ehrenreich’s critique of positive-thinking metaphysics shows how suffering becomes a metaphysical incompetence, while Byung-Chul Han’s psychopolitics exposes the machinery. The universe gives you exactly what you “vibrate” at, therefore oppression is a personal error in attunement. Under the banner of cosmic law, structural violence gets smuggled back into the soul.
The communitarian continuation
Elsewhere the logic sheds individualism and dons collectivist armor. Nationalist and neo-reactionary subcultures revive a communitarian Social Darwinism: not “let the weak die,” but “the weak corrode the integrity of the group; they must be reshaped or cast out.” Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction supplies the architecture, while Mosse and Sternhell documented the older völkisch genealogies in which the nation is a body whose purity must be defended. Sloterdijk’s worries about “anthropotechnics” sketch out the same hardening impulse at the civilizational scale. The unit must be strong enough to withstand others. Anderson would remind us that nations are imagined communities, but Agamben would insist that they are imagined first through a field of inclusive and exclusive thresholds — precisely where this communitarian Darwinism nests.
The psychoanalytic continuation
Psychoanalysis was far from immune to this contagion. Adler’s inferiority/superiority dialectic, originally a theory of psychic compensation, became the template for the upward-striver personality championed in mid-century management discourse. Christopher Lasch recognized the narcissistic culture that grew from this soil. Foucault, and later Lennard Davis, show why: modern psychology — and psychoanalysis by extension — was built inside the expanding regime of normality, itself an offshoot of Galtonian statistical rationality. Goffman’s observations about maladaptation and “failure to cope” reveal the same evaluative hierarchy: the well-formed personality is the one most capable of adapting to the imposed norm. Social Darwinism in the register of character.
The therapeutic continuation
Vulgar CBT and solution-focused thinking take the same logic and strip away even the remnants of metaphysics. Your thoughts generate your outcomes; suffering is an error in cognition. Nikolas Rose calls this the “governing of the soul,” where therapeutic culture becomes a technology of self-responsibilization. Eva Illouz tracks how emotional skill becomes a neoliberal competency measure. Hacking’s looping effects show how people reshape themselves under these categories, staging their inner lives in accordance with the demand to be psychologically “fit.” What remains is Calvinism without God, psychoanalysis without the unconscious, and Darwin without heredity: a world where the unfit have only themselves to blame.
The progressive utilitarian continuation
Even in progressive welfare logics, the ghosts linger. Sen and Nussbaum’s capability approach, while egalitarian, still risks reintroducing subtle hierarchies of “capacity” and “benefit potential.” Marshall’s social citizenship contained similar residues; Cruikshank’s work on empowerment shows how easily egalitarian projects become disciplinary. Stone and Gilmore reveal how triage logics — even in compassionate hands — encode racialized, ableist, and classed assumptions about whose flourishing counts. The rhetoric of “allocating scarce resources” sound neutral, but the metrics used to justify it are often saturated in quasi-Darwinian statistical hierarchies. The meritocratic welfare subject is simply the “fit” subject in modern dress.
The Psychological and Managerial continuation
Managerialism absorbed the evolutionary grammar with barely a hiccup. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man already traced how intelligence testing carried eugenicist categories into 20th-century institutions. Drucker, corporate consulting, and organizational psychology translated these into the language of “talent,” “high performers,” and “leadership potential.” Kahneman and Tversky’s cognitive-bias revolution — transmitted through business books and HR workshops — often becomes an implicit anthropology dividing rational agents from defective ones. Ravitch and Freire document how education systems reproduce these same logics through standardized testing. Competitive worth becomes destiny; innate potential becomes the metric by which institutions sort their subjects.
The Pop Cultural and Self-Help continuation
Popular culture metabolizes the same logic into spectacle. Reality television, entrepreneurial self-help, YouTube masculinities, and grindset culture canonize ruthless competition as virtue. Mark Fisher called this market-driven fatalism “capitalist realism,” a world in which alternatives collapse into personality deficits. Berlant’s “cruel optimism” names the trap perfectly: clinging to fantasies of achievement that slowly kill you. Malabou’s notion of plasticity shows how neoliberal culture venerates self-remaking while punishing those who cannot or will not. Even wellness culture, as Cooper shows, shades into biological optimization — a soft evolutionary language dressed in pastel.
The Academic continuation
And academia is no refuge. Education systems internalize Social Darwinist grammar through meritocratic sorting machines that naturalize inequality as the revelation of innate difference. Bourdieu exposed how these systems misrecognize inherited advantage as talent; Bowles and Gintis demonstrated how school structures reproduce class hierarchy under the guise of merit. Michael Young coined “meritocracy” as a dystopian joke, yet the academy adopted it as an ideal. Kozol, Sennett, and Lareau have all shown how failure among the poor is framed as an individual deficit rather than the predictable effect of structural deprivation. It is Social Darwinism translated into the neutral language of standards, metrics, and “student potential.”
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