Everyday Eugenics: The Psychology of Who We Let Die
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. This week, we're talking about something people often don't want to hear because it's uncomfortable. It makes us look at ourselves and at the systems we live in, but it's important. We're talking about everyday eugenics, not the history textbook version with the swastikas and gas chambers, not just pseudoscientific horror from a century ago, although that's all part of it.
Leslie Poston:We're talking about the quiet kind, the kind we barely notice, the kind of eugenics that's baked into policies, health care, our language, media, and even our self worth, the kind that decides without saying so out loud that some people don't deserve to live. Everyday eugenics is what happens when a society decides again and again that people who can't work or who can't work enough or who might need a little support to survive, don't count. It's what happens when we treat health care as a privilege tied to employment, not a right tied to existence. It's what happens when our government shrugs and says, only some people will die during a pandemic. And it's what happens when we let that slide, when we start to believe it's okay.
Leslie Poston:Let's talk about how we got here and what's really going on beneath the surface. We're taught from an early age that our value comes from productivity. It's in our school system, our work culture, our insurance plans even. The phrase hardworking American has become a shorthand for deserving human, and that's a problem. This mindset starts early.
Leslie Poston:Think about how schools handle disabled students. The pressure to mainstream the constant testing to prove accommodation needs, the way IEPs become negotiations about what a child can contribute rather than what they need to thrive. Kids learn quickly that being different means justifying your existence. The truth is these ideas didn't come from nowhere. We're conditioned to believe that struggle is noble only when it leads to productivity.
Leslie Poston:Rest, healing, or dependence are seen as moral failings. That's why people brag about working through the flu, but hesitate to say they took time to recover. That mindset is part of a psychological pattern that links value to output even when the output is unsustainable or damaging. Even the Americans with Disabilities Act, groundbreaking as it was, reinforces this logic. It requires reasonable accommodation, but only if you can still perform essential job functions.
Leslie Poston:It protects your right to work, not your right to exist without working. Employers routinely challenge accommodations by questioning whether someone can be productive enough to justify the expense. And it's not just workplaces. Families absorb this logic of everyday eugenics too. How often do we hear relatives described as contributing or pulling their weight?
Leslie Poston:How often do disabled family members internalize shame about needing care? The productivity trap doesn't stop at the office door. It shapes how we see ourselves in every relationship. In most developed countries, health care is a shared responsibility. In The United States, it's a gatekeeping tool.
Leslie Poston:You have to prove you deserve it, and if you don't, you're left out completely. If that sounds extreme, consider how common it is here to see phrases like they brought it on themselves or they should have worked harder. When health care is tied to employment, what happens to the people who can't work or who work part time or who are caregivers, parents, disabled, retired, or chronically ill? They're punished by the system, and not subtly, not slowly, but with real consequences like going without treatment, dying in debt, or becoming homeless after a medical crisis. That isn't just bad policy.
Leslie Poston:That's a belief system, a belief that says your body only matters if it produces. It's a cultural narrative reinforced by decades of political messaging and media framing. We're told that health care is scarce, that there's not enough for everyone, that covering people who can't pay would hurt the rest of us. But that's a lie and a powerful one. And when that lie is repeated enough, people start to believe that letting someone die is unfortunate but acceptable, especially if that someone is disabled, old, poor, or struggling with addiction or black or indigenous.
Leslie Poston:This isn't about bad doctors or evil politicians. It's about a system designed to stretch people to their limits and then blame them when they break. You can see it in how long people are expected to wait for care, in how quickly coverage is denied, and in how easily health benefits are lost. Even the language around health care access reinforces it. We talk about consumers and plans, not patients and care.
Leslie Poston:We talk about overuse instead of unmet needs. Black women in The US are three times as more likely to die in childbirth than white women. People of color routinely report having their pain dismissed in clinical settings. Trans people are denied basic health care. People with disabilities face life threatening delays or outright refusals of service.
Leslie Poston:From pulse oximeters that don't work on darker skin to racial correction factors and kidney function test, the message is clear. Some bodies are considered default and others disposable. And for all the talk of scarcity, the money is there. The political will is not. When people say the system is overwhelmed, they're often masking the fact that the system is exclusive by design.
Leslie Poston:The overwhelmed part, that's us, the people trying to survive inside it. During the early years of this ongoing COVID nineteen pandemic, we saw this logic play out in real time. Federal officials, people at the highest levels, said things like, only the elderly and immunocompromised are at risk, as if that were reassuring, as if those people were disposable. That phrase, only some people will die, is everyday eugenics in one sentence. Psychologically, this is called psychic numbing.
Leslie Poston:When confronted with mass harm, especially abstract harm, the human mind tends to protect itself by shutting down empathy. The more people at risk, the less we care. And when the people at risk are already marginalized, it's easier to justify that emotional detachment. But that numbness, that wasn't accidental. Media messaging contributed deliberately.
Leslie Poston:Charts, death tolls, policy updates without names. We got used to hearing about loss without feeling it. We were taught to move on. Compare that to how individual tragedies are covered with names, faces, stories that make you care. Mass death gets spreadsheets.
Leslie Poston:Individual death gets humanity. You could see the shift in public language designed to create distance. Risk was reframed as personal responsibility. Protect the vulnerable became a slogan instead of a mandate. Personal choice became the framework for collective action.
Leslie Poston:These weren't neutral phrases. They were psychological tools designed to transfer responsibility from institutions to individuals. The personal responsibility messaging was particularly insidious. It took systemic failures, inadequate ventilation, lack of paid sick leave, inaccessible health care, and reframed them as individual choices. Can't afford to stay home sick?
Leslie Poston:That's your poor planning. Caught COVID at your essential job? You should have been more careful. This rhetoric didn't just excuse policy failures. It made people blame themselves for experiencing the consequences of those systemic failures.
Leslie Poston:And it worked. People stopped expecting collective solutions because they'd been trained to see survival as an individual problem. Many stopped believing COVID remains a problem worth caring about. That's not accidental numbness. That's manufactured consent for mass abandonment.
Leslie Poston:Now we're watching some of the most powerful people in government double down. RFK junior, a former presidential candidate, is actively working to dismantle the Department of Health and Human Services. The GOP is pushing legislation that guts Medicaid, shrinks Social Security, and rolls back protections for people with disabilities. These are not neutral actions. Cutting health programs will kill people.
Leslie Poston:Defunding social safety nets will kill people. In fact, the defunding of USAID has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide in the last few months. And yet the media often covers these moves as budgetary matters, bureaucratic decisions as controversial but not catastrophic. That framing is part of the problem because it dulls urgency. It makes mass harm look like political disagreement.
Leslie Poston:Psychologically, that creates distance. It keeps people from reacting, resisting, and sometimes even noticing. And there's a pattern here. When public services are dismantled, it's rarely sold as harm. It's packaged as efficiency.
Leslie Poston:Waste becomes a buzzword, but waste in these contexts means people. People who use services, Medicaid, SNAP, disability, housing aid. These programs are not bloated. They're lifelines, and defunding them doesn't just tighten budgets. It shortens lives.
Leslie Poston:The idea that helping people is too expensive only makes sense if you've been taught those lives are worth less, and many Americans have. Sure. Not overtly, but through repetition, through budget hearings, through media that frames social care as a handout, through endless stories about fraud, not survival. Those narratives don't just justify cuts. They prepare people to accept the consequences of those cuts.
Leslie Poston:And we need to start calling these actions what they are. They're not reforms. They're targeted erasure. Everyday eugenics. Let's look a little deeper at health care's contribution to everyday eugenics.
Leslie Poston:The idea that some bodies matter more than others is not new. It's part of our medical history. Take J. Marion Sims, often called the father of gynecology. He experimented on enslaved black women without anesthesia and without consent because he believed their pain didn't matter.
Leslie Poston:Or look at the forced sterilization campaigns targeting indigenous women, women with disabilities, and women of color well into the late twentieth century. These weren't isolated incidents. They were systemic. Today, those patterns continue in quieter ways. Black women in The United States are still three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women.
Leslie Poston:People of color routinely report having their pain dismissed in clinical settings. Trans people are denied basic care. People with disabilities face life threatening delays or refusals of service. These aren't unfortunate mistakes. They're symptoms of a medical system built on a hierarchy of human value.
Leslie Poston:As medical sociologist Rua Benjamin writes, the legacy of medical apartheid hasn't disappeared. It's simply evolved into the new Jim Code, where bias is embedded not just in doctors, but in the technologies, algorithms, and policies guiding modern care. From pulse oximeters that don't work on darker skin to racial correction factors and kidney function tests, the message is clear. Some bodies are still considered default and others disposable. These biases aren't just reflections of prejudice.
Leslie Poston:They're embedded into clinical decision making tools, research funding, and diagnostic protocols. Certain conditions that primarily affect women or racial minorities like endometriosis, lupus, or sickle cell disease are under researched, undertreated, and underfunded. Algorithms used in hospitals to triage care or allocate transplants sometimes replicate those same disparities because they're trained on biased historical data. And when technology reinforces old inequities, it's harder for people to call it discrimination. It's just a shrug in how the system works.
Leslie Poston:This makes the insidious everyday version of eugenics harder to fight because it's quiet and systemic. It's wrapped in math and policy and objectivity, but it's still choosing who gets to live well and who is quietly discarded as too complicated, too expensive, or too inconvenient to live at all. Media plays a huge role in shaping how we view people who are aging, disabled, sick, or nonconforming. Think about how often those characters are missing from our movies, news, or advertising. And when they do appear, it's usually in one of a few ways as inspirational heroes overcoming adversity, as a stereotypical villain, or as burdens to their families and to the state.
Leslie Poston:Those aren't real portrayals. They're scripts. These scripts are what disability studies scholars like Rosemarie Garland Thompson call narrative prostheses, stories that use disabled characters as tools to generate emotion or moral lessons for able-bodied audiences rather than portraying them as full people. And repeated scripts become mental shortcuts. Psychologists call these heuristics.
Leslie Poston:The more we see someone portrayed a certain way, the more we start to believe it without questioning it. There's a name for that too, cultivation theory. It explains how media shapes our perceptions of reality over time. If the only stories we see about disabled people frame them as tragic or dependent, we start to believe that's all they are, and that belief affects how we vote, how we speak, how we fund programs, and how we treat each other. It drives the trend into an everyday eugenics mindset.
Leslie Poston:Media doesn't just reflect reality, it constructs it. And it constructs it with eerie consistency. Consider how many films and TV shows center characters who overcome a disability just enough to be relatable, but not so much that they disrupt the able-bodied main character's narrative arc. Or how rare it is to see a disabled character whose story isn't tragic, medicalized, heroic. That erasure trains audiences to see disabled life as either exceptional or expendable.
Leslie Poston:And it's not just fiction either. In news coverage, people with disabilities are often portrayed as drains on the system or as rare success stories who defied the odds. These narrow frames leave no room for regular complex lives. And when people can't imagine your life is worth living, they're less likely to defend your right to live it. Let's talk about ableism for a second.
Leslie Poston:Ableism isn't just something other people do to us. It's something we do to ourselves. That's what makes it so hard to spot. People internalize the idea that they're worth less if they can't work or if they need help or if they're in pain. We say things like, oh, I don't want to be a burden or I hate being useless or I'm not like those people.
Leslie Poston:That's all internalized ableism. It's the voice of a system that has taught us our worth has to be earned. This self blame can be devastating. It leads to depression, isolation, anxiety, and sometimes even suicide, and it makes people less likely to ask for help and to fight for their own care. The system relies on this.
Leslie Poston:If enough people believe they're the problem, not the policy, then the policy never changes. And that's why so many people hide their disabilities or delay care. Sometimes they keep working long after their bodies tell them to stop. Shame does what policy enforcement doesn't have to. It makes people regulate themselves to apologize for needing time off or to feel guilty for using mobility aids.
Leslie Poston:They shrink their own existence because the system has told them they take up too much space. And this internal policing shows up in how we talk also. Up. At least I'm not on welfare or I just need to get better and get back to work. These are not harmless phrases.
Leslie Poston:They're the echoes of a culture that has told us over and over again, rest is laziness, need is weakness, and survival must be earned. Looking back at everything we've talked about so far in this episode, it's certainly tempting to think, well, that's just how things are. We can't change anything. But that thought process is by design. The propaganda of eugenics and the twentieth century didn't end.
Leslie Poston:It just got smarter. Now it hides in our language, headlines, bureaucratic speak. It hides in the way we talk about budgets, health care, and difficult decisions. Terms like cost effectiveness, risk management, triage are used to mask decisions about who gets to live. And most of us don't even realize that's what we're agreeing to when we repeat these phrases.
Leslie Poston:This kind of language sanitizes harm. It makes preventable death sound like math. It keeps our conversations centered on resources instead of people. And once those terms are in place, the public debate narrows. Instead of asking, why can't we provide care for everyone?
Leslie Poston:People start asking, who can we afford to save? There's a psychological term called moral disengagement that describes how people justify harmful behavior when it benefits a group they belong to or when they feel powerless to stop it. We're seeing that now on a mass scale. People aren't necessarily inherently evil. They're overwhelmed.
Leslie Poston:And overwhelmed people often reach for familiar framing to make sense of chaos. And that's exactly what propaganda exploits. Media contributes to the problem by repeating those frames. Flattening policy debates into budget fights are both sides' coverage. Public health becomes politics, and harm becomes opinion.
Leslie Poston:Lives become numbers and a scrolling chyron. But we are not powerless. We've just been trained to feel that way. Propaganda numbs you, but culture can wake you up. So what can we do?
Leslie Poston:We start by seeing clearly. We name the systems for exactly what they are. We stop calling them broken and start calling them intentional. We listen to disabled activists who've been naming this problem for decades. Follow organizations like ADAPT, the Disability Justice Collective, and local disabled led groups.
Leslie Poston:Amplify their work instead of speaking over it. Concretely, this means voting with policy and survival in mind. Support candidates who back universal health care, universal basic income, and robust disability services. Vote in local and midterm elections where your school board and city council decisions directly affect accessibility and services. Show up to town halls and budget meetings.
Leslie Poston:They're not glamorous, but they're where life and death decisions get made. Support mutual aid networks that keep people alive when the state won't. Find your local disability mutual aid group, community fridges, or harm reduction organizations. Donate money if you have it, time if you don't. Learn about the disabled people in your community and what they actually need, not what you think they need.
Leslie Poston:Change how you talk. Stop using productivity language to describe human worth. When someone says, I feel useless, don't respond with the knee jerk, you're not useless. You contribute so much. That just reinforces the productivity trap.
Leslie Poston:Try responding with your worth isn't about what you produce. Instead, challenge ableist language when you hear it, including your own. At work, push for real accommodation policies, not just legal compliance. Annotate for flexible schedules, remote work, and inclusive hiring practices. If you're in health care, education, or social services, question policies that create barriers.
Leslie Poston:If you're in media, examine whose stories get told and how. Let's rewire how we see each other and stop defining people by productivity. Stop treating care as charity. Remember that being alive is enough reason to want someone to live. This isn't easy work.
Leslie Poston:It takes constant awareness and constant correction. But the alternative, accepting everyday eugenics as normal, isn't something we can afford. Not if we want a world where everyone matters and not just the strong, not just the well, not just the deserving, everyone. So ask yourself, who benefits from a world where care is conditional? Who profits from our shame?
Leslie Poston:Who gains power when we accept that only certain bodies deserve comfort, support, and time to heal? Once you start asking those questions, the logic of the whole system starts to crack. So we're not just up against a policy. We're up against a story. A story told so many times that it feels like common sense, but it's not.
Leslie Poston:It's an ideology, and an ideology can be improved and replaced. That replacement happens through daily practice. Every time you center access in event planning, encourage masking, encourage wheelchair accessibility, make sure everyone is able to participate in the event. Every time you choose political candidates based on their disability policies, not just their electability. Every time you support disabled owned businesses or hire disabled colleagues or refuse to let conversations about difficult people or expensive accommodations go unchallenged, it builds.
Leslie Poston:Every conversation that centers care over convenience, every vote cast with someone else's survival in mind, every decision to value people for their humanity instead of their labor, that's resistance. And resistance matters because the alternative is numbness. It's letting the machine run while telling ourselves we can't stop it, but we can. The spell breaks every time someone names what's really happening. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Leslie Poston:You can only decide whether you want to be part of it or help tear it down. Thanks for listening to this week's PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. And as always, until next time, stay curious. And don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss a week, and maybe send it to a friend so more people start understanding their world.
Leslie Poston:Thanks for listening.
Creators and Guests
