Eugenics as self-loathing

There is a particular kind of modern person who, upon encountering the messiness of human life, its sheer ungovernable profusion, and the suffering it entails, recoils not with pity or solidarity but with disgust. And because disgust is rarely accepted as its own justification, such a person dresses his disgust in the language of optimization, selection, species-level improvement—that is, eugenics. But if you listen carefully, he is not really saying, “Humanity could be better.” He is saying, “I cannot bear what I am.”