In Book V of The Republic, Plato proposes that the ideal state should control human reproduction.
The best men should mate with the best women "as often as possible," while inferior pairings should be discouraged. Children of superior unions should be raised by the state. Children of inferior unions—or children born with defects—should be "quietly disposed of."
This was written in approximately 380 BCE. It is considered one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy. It is taught in universities around the world to students who are not typically asked to sit with the implications.
Plato wasn't alone. Sparta practiced infant exposure—newborns judged unfit were left on the hillside at Mount Taygetus. Rome gave fathers the legal right to reject infants at birth. Selective breeding of humans isn't a modern idea. It's one of the oldest ideas in civilization.
What changes across centuries isn't the impulse. It's the technology.
The Eugenics Movement: When Philosophy Became Policy
In 1883, Francis Galton—Charles Darwin's half-cousin—coined the term "eugenics" from the Greek for "well-born." His proposal was straightforward: apply the principles of animal husbandry to human populations. Encourage the "fit" to reproduce. Discourage the "unfit."
Galton's ideas spread with remarkable speed. By the early twentieth century, eugenics was mainstream science—not fringe, not controversial, but the consensus position of leading biologists, physicians, and social scientists in the United States, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia.
The United States led the way in implementation.
Indiana passed the first compulsory sterilization law in 1907. By 1931, thirty states had similar laws. Between 1907 and 1983, approximately 65,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized—disproportionately people who were poor, non-white, disabled, or institutionalized.
The criteria for "unfitness" were vague enough to be applied to almost anyone. Epilepsy. "Feeble-mindedness"—a category so broad it included anyone who scored poorly on culturally biased IQ tests. "Moral degeneracy"—which could mean anything from promiscuity to poverty to being an inconvenient political presence.
Carrie Buck was sterilized by the state of Virginia in 1927 after the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in Buck v. Bell that compulsory sterilization was constitutional. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the opinion: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
Carrie Buck was not an imbecile. She was a poor woman who had been raped by her foster family's nephew and institutionalized to hide the pregnancy. Her mother had been institutionalized for similar reasons. Her daughter—the "third generation" Holmes referenced—was later assessed as normal intelligence before dying of illness at age eight.
The science was wrong. The victims were convenient. The legal framework persisted for decades.
The Nazi Implementation
The Nazi regime's eugenics program didn't emerge from nothing. It was built on American foundations.
German eugenicists explicitly cited American sterilization laws as precedent. The Rockefeller Foundation funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute researchers who later designed the Nazi eugenics program. Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1936 for his contributions to "racial hygiene."
The Nazis took American eugenics and removed the constraints.
The 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring mandated sterilization for a range of conditions. Approximately 400,000 people were sterilized under this law. The T4 program, beginning in 1939, moved from sterilization to killing—an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people with disabilities were murdered in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
The gas chambers developed for T4 were later scaled up for the Final Solution. The personnel who ran the disability killing centers were transferred to the extermination camps. The technology of industrialized murder was prototyped on disabled Germans before being applied to Jews, Roma, and other targeted populations.
This is the trajectory: philosophy → science → policy → atrocity. Each step felt rational to the people taking it.
The Modern Landscape
After the Holocaust, eugenics became a dirty word. The science was discredited. The movement was repudiated. We learned our lesson.
Except we didn't stop selecting.
We changed the language, the methods, and the justification. We moved from state coercion to individual choice. We replaced crude racial categories with precise genetic markers. We swapped "racial hygiene" for "reproductive autonomy."
The technology changed everything.
Prenatal screening is now standard practice in most developed countries. In Denmark, 98% of pregnancies with a Down syndrome diagnosis are terminated. In Iceland, the number approaches 100%. In the United States, the rate is approximately 67%.
These are individual decisions made by individual parents. No state is mandating them. No institution is coercing them. But the aggregate result is the same: a population-level reduction in the birth rate of people with a specific genetic condition.
Is this eugenics? The answer depends entirely on your definition. If eugenics means state-controlled selective breeding, then no. If eugenics means systematic genetic selection at the population level, then the line is harder to draw.
Preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) allows parents using IVF to screen embryos for genetic conditions before implantation. The technology is clinically available, ethically accepted (for medical conditions), and increasingly used.
The question is where medical screening ends and selection begins.
Screening for Huntington's disease—a fatal neurodegenerative condition with no cure—is widely considered acceptable. Screening for deafness is more contested. Screening for sex is legal in some jurisdictions and banned in others. Screening for traits like intelligence, height, or personality is not yet possible with current technology.
But the technology is advancing faster than the ethics.
Polygenic scoring uses statistical models to predict complex traits—height, disease risk, cognitive ability—from patterns across thousands of genetic variants. The predictions are probabilistic, not deterministic, and currently imprecise for most traits. But they're improving. Companies already offer polygenic scoring for embryo selection in IVF.
We are building Plato's breeding program one consumer product at a time.
The Order's Logic
In The Architecture of Survival, the Order's philosophy is Plato's philosophy extended across 3,200 years and refined by technology.
They begin with a defensible premise: civilizations collapse in predictable patterns, and certain genetic traits—cognitive flexibility, stress tolerance, pattern recognition—help populations survive collapse. This is true. Genetic variation in stress response, cognitive function, and adaptability is real and measurable.
Their next step is also defensible: identify and protect the bloodlines that carry these traits. This is selective breeding, but aimed at species survival rather than racial purity. In the context of the Bronze Age Collapse—when 90% of the Eastern Mediterranean population died—it's hard to argue that preserving resilient genetics wasn't rational.
The problem is what rationality does across centuries.
The Order's breeding program begins as preservation. It becomes optimization. Optimization becomes control. Control becomes elimination. By the time we reach the modern era, the Order isn't preserving resilient bloodlines—it's engineering a global population crash and selecting who survives.
Each step was logical. Each step was justified by the previous step's success. And each step moved further from the original purpose until the mechanism designed to save humanity became a mechanism designed to cull it.
This is the history of eugenics in miniature. Plato wanted the best city. Galton wanted the best species. The Nazis wanted the best race. Each one followed the logic of selection to its natural conclusion.
The Question We're Not Asking
The current debate over genetic selection focuses almost entirely on individual choice. Should parents be allowed to screen embryos? Should genetic information be available to consumers? Should polygenic scoring be regulated?
These are important questions. They're also the wrong frame.
The right question is systemic: What happens when millions of individual genetic choices aggregate into a population-level pattern?
If every parent selects against the same conditions, those conditions disappear from the population. If embryo screening becomes standard and polygenic scoring becomes precise, the aggregate effect of millions of individual "free choices" will be a narrowing of human genetic diversity that no single parent intended.
This is the Order's philosophy, implemented not through conspiracy but through consumer products. No one is pulling the lever. Everyone is pulling the lever. The result is the same.
Plato would have recognized it immediately. He would have approved.
That should make us uncomfortable.