Nikola Tesla and Francis Crick were in favor of eugenics, too. Not that I find them in any way inspiring or anything, quite the opposite. But, again, they realized how important it is that people like me be spared this nonsensical and awful existence you all praise so much because you simply are in deep, deep love with yourself.

One reason people often get defensive when someone claims that genetics is destiny, that genes shape you more than your environment is that it makes them feel bad about themselves. Some even acknowledge this, saying that it gives them the feeling or hope that they can still improve. I believed this myself for some time, but finally I had to give in to reality and realize that one’s genes play a more important role after I looked into the research. This is also why I don’t take anyone seriously who tries to make the point that nurture is more important. It can’t be. And you cannot even choose your environment or the time you’ll be living in either. I know my own limitations well enough, and if someone told me I could become a Goethe or Shakespeare or Kierkegaard, I would laugh him off.

It gives people the cosy feeling of blaming others for their failures, instead of accepting that they really had not much influence on any of their shortcomings. At best, one may blame their parents. After all, a lot gets inherited, and if I had children—as written above—, they would be the same ugly losers that I am. Or maybe blame the state, who did not sterilize those parents. And so on. But instead, they blame those who are the least responsible.

How does this fit in with my Christian worldview? Not much of a problem, really: we are responsible morally, but if I hardly graduate high school, if I am an ugly hunchback, I am not at fault for not having become a lawyer or popular with the girls. It was never in my reach, and so those who talk about “God-given talents” really are only in love with themselves, because I have no talents, I have nothing to be proud of. I’m a horrible loser.

Some do support eugenics, but then they do it only in a wicked way, by denigrating, for example, a commenter who defended eugenics, writing that of course mentally ill trash should not reproduce, exempting themselves from that category. It is all well and good if not all supporters of eugenics want themselves to be sterilized. However, seeing oneself as superior (genetically) to others and calling them trash is just vulgar.

To those who say that this world and life itself is tainted by sin, that there is no perfect life, we all suffer more or less and so on: this is true in general, but it is false in the particular. I have taken this view myself on these pages.
My point, though, is that mental illness is something not everyone suffers from, neither do many suffer from being hunchbacks. There are people who never really suffer much in their lives, neither physically or mentally. No one knows who will be saved or not (I speak from a Christian standpoint): some might suffer a lot and be damned to eternal torture. Only God knows.

Schopenhauer quotes Lord Byron in the II. volume of his The World as Will and Representation (Chapter XLVI. On The Vanity And Suffering Of Life), in his addition to the fourth book of the I. volume:

Our life is a false nature—’tis not in

The harmony of things, this hard decree,

This uneradicable taint of sin,

This boundless Upas, this all-blasting tree

Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be

The skies, which rain their plagues on men like dew—

Disease, death, bondage—all the woes we see—

And worse, the woes we see not—which throb through

The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new.

Even the German Christian physician Dr. Karl Weißbrodt, in a small book titled The Conjugal Duty (Die eheliche Pflicht), writes that certain people must not marry, or only after they fully recovered from their afflictions. And some of those he mentions are permanent. He continues that this should be taken into consideration not only for oneself and one’s spouse, but also for the children and lineage one is about to have as a married man or woman. And who did he ask to refrain from marrying?
Bingo! Hunchbacks, among others. And his book was lauded by several clerics.

I will end this with a quote by Kierkegaard, who was hunchbacked and mentally ill too. He, however, was gifted with such a brilliant mind as are only very, very few individuals. If such exist at all in all centuries.
I, on the other hand, have to endure my mediocre existence: no great theological works will come forth from my lousy pen.

From christiananswers.net:

[…] If such a tactic does not work, then forced sterilization may be a viable—albeit desperate—option, since it does not entail the death of the unborn. […]

To quote from thefriendshipbench.org/a-letter-to-parents-surviving-a-childs-suicide/:

My son of 42 years committed suicide on Dec.22, 2020, they found his body on Christmas Day. He left behind his brother 46, and his son and daughter 21 and me. I am not mad at him, I am mad at all the people who kept it from me. I live 4000 miles away and I had to learn of my son’s death from facebook of all places. Three weeks after the fact. He was cremated and buried before I even knew he was gone. I feel mostly guilt. I have chronic depression and have tried to kill myself many times. I fear it is a hereditary disease. My older son also has chronic depression and wishes to die all the time like I do. We both sought help, my younger son did not. He didn’t show any signs of depression, except he was angry all the time, and had trouble controlling his temper, as attested to by his long list of failed relationships. I don’t know how to get rid of the guilt. I have no one to talk to, my girlfriends just said they were sorry for me. My husband, not his father, said that’s to bad and went on about his day. I got no emotional support. How my life after death will work itself out, remains to be seen.

(Emphasis mine.)

I am not trying to exploit such a tragedy, but it is pretty clear that there is a strong genetic component to mental illness, given that it seems to run in certain families. See the Jordan Peterson quote too, for example.

Quoting Sir Keith Joseph from a speech he held in 1974 at Edgbaston (“our human stock is threatened”) (mirror):

[…]

The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened. A recent article in Poverty, published by the Child Poverty Action Group, showed that a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness which are more important than riches. They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, sub-normal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters. Yet these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births. A high proportion of these births are a tragedy for the mother, the child and for us.

Yet what shall we do? If we do nothing, the nation moves towards degeneration, however much resources we pour into preventative work and the over-burdened educational system. It is all the more serious when we think of the loss of people with talent and initiative through emigration as our semi-socialism deprives them of adequate opportunities, rewards and satisfactions.

Yet proposals to extend birth-control facilities to these classes of people, particularly the young unmarried girls, the potential young unmarried mothers, evokes entirely understandable moral opposition. Is it not condoning immorality? I suppose it is. But which is the lesser evil, until we are able to remoralise whole groups and classes of people, undoing the harm done when already weak restraints on strong instincts are further weakened by permissiveness in television, in films, on bookstalls?

The worship of instinct, of spontaneity, the rejection of self-discipline, is not progress — it is degeneration.

It was Freud who argued that repression of instincts is the price we pay for civilisation. He considered the price well-paid. So can we, now. But we must see the dilemmas, we must argue it out among ourselves, to find a way through these moral dilemmas, while we fight for our ideals in wider fora through words and deeds. But you may ask what can fallible politicians in short-lived governments do in the face of all these tidal forces? Most of what needs to be done, I have stressed, is for individuals as themselves and as members of all manner of bodies. But some tasks are for government, and to these I will return on a future occasion.

This could be a watershed in our national existence. Are we to move towards moral decline reflected and intensified by economic decline, by the corrosive effects of inflation? Or can we remoralise our national life, of which the economy is an integral part? It is up to us, to people like you and me.

(Emphasis mine.)

Unfortunately, no one listened — at least no one who could’ve changed course.