There were multiple points of interest for the Eugenicists. One of them was for the general public and how to get them to have a proscribed conduct and behavior.

Maybe you've seen those diagrams where they have 2 life paths depicted from the Victorian era. That's from Eugenics. Example: https://ia800301.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages....

Here's "The Road to Success" for "The Young Man" https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre00shan/page/244/...

Again, this is part of Eugenics. We focus on the part that was removed (race science) and leave mostly unexamined the parts that were reinvented or repurposed as say, "The Power of Positive Thinking".

Eugenics books, for the general public, were a different beast. Probably the best succinct description for how they thought of themselves can be summarized in this 1921 diagram: https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/efc97918-8073-4...

It is a dangerous psuedoscientific epistemology - a practice with a bunch of faulty logic and ways of knowing that can lead to disasters and it's alive and well - for instance, assuming a social structure in lobsters applies to humans. That these adherents tend to be revealed as secretly racist and thus subscribe to the part which was removed, should be of no shock.

We've mischaracterized Eugenics[1] and allowed it to fester by other names or as Maurice Bardèche, the french neo-fascist observed about fascism in the 60s, "With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn"

The point is that if you don't draw the perimeter right around an idea, you can't reign it in. It'll just escape from your hands and re-emerge as something else. So, for instance, the slave plantation becomes the prison farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_farm).

We tend to, for good reason, ignore societal trainwrecks and blights on our past. But trainwrecks are the most important thing to study if we strive to build safer trains and seek to avoid similar disasters in the future.

Things have to be accurately tackled with in order to defeat them.

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[1] it's worth noting it's a big topic and some "real" science has also come out of it, such as biosocial theory and biostatistics studies. Peer reviewed journals such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Heredity used to be eugenics journals. This is, however, a very small minority.