Racial purity hedges assets, Racial diversity hedges risks

The two geographies of pure Auschwitz and impure Manhattan (those opposing antidotes to each other) nevertheless shared the concept of 'hedging', in its metaphorical sense.

Modernity re-invented nations away from being historically based on a common voluntary citizenship among a diversity of languages and ethnicities and religions.

Now they were to become entities striving to become ever more biologically pure as race-nations, based on the supposedly common genetic origins of the majority group religious-language-ethnicity within them.

Now you were to either be born a citizen-for-life (your choice removed) based on your putative ethnicity or never-can-be-a-citizen (again your choice removed) based upon your putative ethnicity.

The main way all nations adopting this scheme used to become ever more racially pure was a migration control 'hedge' around the national borders : let no foreigners in as citizens and 'ethnic cleanse' internal minorities out, never more to return, by denying them all sorts of civil rights, such as access to jobs and education.

Ultimately, this led to the ultimate means to purify a biological nation : killing centres like Aktion T4's Grafeneck and the Holocaust's Auschwitz to remove defectives from the majority ethnicity and then go after minority populations, seen as all defective.

This hedge shielded what the promoters considered their nation's best asset : its original majority ethnic group, no longer to be diluted by in-migration of strangers (and often, not to be diluted by out-migration of the majority group membership, which was made as difficult as politically possible.)

Negative eugenics having eliminated much of the unwanted impurities, positive eugenic measures like state support for mothers and children of the majority group further protected the main asset.

It was K-selection among the human nations : deliberately work to drain your gene pool, put all your eggs in one basket, bet the farm on carefully raising a relatively restricted number of offspring as best you can.

Microbes don't operate this way and neither does impure Manhattan, the original home of human diversity.

Because instead of hedging assets, they hedge bets/risks.

Striving to survive and flourish in a complex and dynamically changing environment, they choose to spread their risks by containing within a wide number of different phenotypes, all in the expectation that at any given moment, a few types among many will be ideally suited to surmount current difficulties and seize any current opportunities.

These r-selected nations (or microbe species) take all the risks that they collectively expect to face over time and space and 'hedge off' (limit the damage of) each individual risk by coming up with a phenotype that may be inefficient most of the time but when this particular risk arises, they excel in efficiently surmounting it and even taking advantage of it as an opportunity, not a danger.

To surmount as many unknown future risks as possible, they eagerly seek in advance of any such threats to fill, not drain, their gene pool.

I argue that based on the historical facts, K-selection like pure Auschwitz is not successful in the long run, while r-selection like impure Manhattan, is.

History shows that the r-selected family of life par excellence, the microbes, surviving all that reality can throw at them, for almost four billion years.

The K-selected lifeforms often do very well, for a time, but then are usually quickly killed off whenever a big asteroid drops by for a visit.

Martin Bader was 39 when he died, a skilled craftsman (master shoemaker) with much street smarts --- and with past parkinson syndrome from WWI's sleeping sickness epidemic, murdered by the Nazis at Grafeneck's industrially organized death factory.

Charles Aronson was also 39 when he died, also a skilled craftsman (holding a demanding teletype operator's job at the world's largest newspaper and news agency flagship) with past parkinson syndrome from WWI's sleeping sickness epidemic.

But his life was prolonged, as long as possible, by a doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) who literally gave up his own life to see that life's useful variations, called 'defectives' by the middle class intellectuals of Modernity, enjoyed as much out of life as possible.

In Charles' case, Dawson kickstarted the stalled systemic impure penicillin project and in so doing so, also made life better for ten billion and counting of us since 1940 ....