June 29, 2025 • 25 mins
The Quiet Reality of Everyday Eugenics
In this episode of PsyberSpace, host Leslie Poston digs into the pervasive issue of everyday eugenics embedded in our society. Unlike historical instances marked by overt brutality, today's eugenics are subtle and ingrained in policies, healthcare, media, and cultural mindset. Leslie explores how the worth of individuals is unjustly tied to their productivity, leading to harmful social and systemic practices that marginalize people unable to meet those expectations. The episode highlights the dangerous ideologies underlying healthcare access, policy decisions, and media representation, urging listeners to name the issues, support disabled communities, challenge ableism, and push for systemic change to ensure the inherent value of every person is recognized and respected.
00:00 Introduction to Everyday Eugenics
01:42 The Productivity Trap
03:48 Healthcare as a Gatekeeping Tool
14:38 Media's Role in Shaping Perceptions
17:01 Internalized Ableism and Its Consequences
20:41 Challenging the System and Taking Action
23:29 Conclusion and Call to Action
Research
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Bagenstos, S. R. (2009). Law and the contradictions of the disability rights movement. Yale University Press.
Baynton, D. C. (2001). Disability and the justification of inequality in American history. In P. K. Longmore & L. Umansky (Eds.), The new disability history: American perspectives (pp. 33–57). NYU Press.
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim code. Polity Press.
Blanck, P., Sandler, L. A., Schmeling, J. L., & Schartz, H. A. (2000). The emerging workforce of entrepreneurs with disabilities: Preliminary study of entrepreneurship in Iowa. Iowa Law Review, 85(5), 1583-1668.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.
Calvillo, D. P., Ross, B. J., Garcia, R. J., Smelter, T. J., & Rutchick, A. M. (2020). Political ideology predicts perceptions of the threat of COVID-19 (and susceptibility to fake news about it). Social Psychological and Personality Science, 11(8), 1119-1128.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2019). Racial and ethnic disparities continue in pregnancy-related deaths. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0919-pregnancy-related-deaths.html
Connor, D. J., & Gabel, S. L. (2013). "Cripping" the curriculum through academic activism: Working toward increasing success for students with disabilities. Review of Disability Studies, 9(1), 12-27.
Garland-Thomson, R. (2002). The politics of staring: Visual rhetorics of disability in popular photography. Disability Studies Quarterly, 22(2), 56–75. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v22i2.369
Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (2002). Growing up with television: Cultivation processes. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (Eds.), Media effects: Advances in theory and research (2nd ed., pp. 43–67). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Green, J., Edgerton, J., Naftel, D., Shoub, K., & Cranmer, S. J. (2020). Elusive consensus: Polarization in elite communication on the COVID-19 pandemic. Science Advances, 6(28), eabc2717.
Hart, P. S., Chinn, S., & Soroka, S. (2020). Politicization and polarization in COVID-19 news coverage. Science Communication, 42(5), 679-697.
Jost, J. T., Banaji, M. R., & Nosek, B. A. (2004). A decade of system justification theory: Accumulated evidence of conscious and unconscious bolstering of the status qu
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Leslie Poston (00:11):
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host,
Leslie Poston. This week, we'retalking about something people
often don't want to hear becauseit's uncomfortable. It makes us
look at ourselves and at thesystems we live in, but it's
important. We're talking abouteveryday eugenics, not the
history textbook version withthe swastikas and gas chambers,
(00:35):
not just pseudoscientific horrorfrom a century ago, although
that's all part of it.
We're talking about the quietkind, the kind we barely notice,
the kind of eugenics that'sbaked into policies, health
care, our language, media, andeven our self worth, the kind
(00:55):
that decides without saying soout loud that some people don't
deserve to live. Everydayeugenics is what happens when a
society decides again and againthat people who can't work or
who can't work enough or whomight need a little support to
survive, don't count. It's whathappens when we treat health
(01:17):
care as a privilege tied toemployment, not a right tied to
existence. It's what happenswhen our government shrugs and
says, only some people will dieduring a pandemic. And it's what
happens when we let that slide,when we start to believe it's
okay.
Let's talk about how we got hereand what's really going on
(01:39):
beneath the surface. We'retaught from an early age that
our value comes fromproductivity. It's in our school
system, our work culture, ourinsurance plans even. The phrase
hardworking American has becomea shorthand for deserving human,
and that's a problem. Thismindset starts early.
(02:03):
Think about how schools handledisabled students. The pressure
to mainstream the constanttesting to prove accommodation
needs, the way IEPs becomenegotiations about what a child
can contribute rather than whatthey need to thrive. Kids learn
quickly that being differentmeans justifying your existence.
(02:25):
The truth is these ideas didn'tcome from nowhere. We're
conditioned to believe thatstruggle is noble only when it
leads to productivity.
Rest, healing, or dependence areseen as moral failings. That's
why people brag about workingthrough the flu, but hesitate to
say they took time to recover.That mindset is part of a
(02:49):
psychological pattern that linksvalue to output even when the
output is unsustainable ordamaging. Even the Americans
with Disabilities Act,groundbreaking as it was,
reinforces this logic. Itrequires reasonable
accommodation, but only if youcan still perform essential job
functions.
(03:09):
It protects your right to work,not your right to exist without
working. Employers routinelychallenge accommodations by
questioning whether someone canbe productive enough to justify
the expense. And it's not justworkplaces. Families absorb this
logic of everyday eugenics too.How often do we hear relatives
(03:30):
described as contributing orpulling their weight?
How often do disabled familymembers internalize shame about
needing care? The productivitytrap doesn't stop at the office
door. It shapes how we seeourselves in every relationship.
In most developed countries,health care is a shared
(03:52):
responsibility. In The UnitedStates, it's a gatekeeping tool.
You have to prove you deserveit, and if you don't, you're
left out completely. If thatsounds extreme, consider how
common it is here to see phraseslike they brought it on
themselves or they should haveworked harder. When health care
is tied to employment, whathappens to the people who can't
(04:14):
work or who work part time orwho are caregivers, parents,
disabled, retired, orchronically ill? They're
punished by the system, and notsubtly, not slowly, but with
real consequences like goingwithout treatment, dying in
debt, or becoming homeless aftera medical crisis. That isn't
(04:36):
just bad policy.
That's a belief system, a beliefthat says your body only matters
if it produces. It's a culturalnarrative reinforced by decades
of political messaging and mediaframing. We're told that health
care is scarce, that there's notenough for everyone, that
covering people who can't paywould hurt the rest of us. But
(04:59):
that's a lie and a powerful one.And when that lie is repeated
enough, people start to believethat letting someone die is
unfortunate but acceptable,especially if that someone is
disabled, old, poor, orstruggling with addiction or
black or indigenous.
(05:22):
This isn't about bad doctors orevil politicians. It's about a
system designed to stretchpeople to their limits and then
blame them when they break. Youcan see it in how long people
are expected to wait for care,in how quickly coverage is
denied, and in how easily healthbenefits are lost. Even the
(05:45):
language around health careaccess reinforces it. We talk
about consumers and plans, notpatients and care.
We talk about overuse instead ofunmet needs. Black women in The
US are three times as morelikely to die in childbirth than
white women. People of colorroutinely report having their
(06:07):
pain dismissed in clinicalsettings. Trans people are
denied basic health care. Peoplewith disabilities face life
threatening delays or outrightrefusals of service.
From pulse oximeters that don'twork on darker skin to racial
correction factors and kidneyfunction test, the message is
(06:28):
clear. Some bodies areconsidered default and others
disposable. And for all the talkof scarcity, the money is there.
The political will is not. Whenpeople say the system is
overwhelmed, they're oftenmasking the fact that the system
is exclusive by design.
The overwhelmed part, that's us,the people trying to survive
(06:50):
inside it. During the earlyyears of this ongoing COVID
nineteen pandemic, we saw thislogic play out in real time.
Federal officials, people at thehighest levels, said things
like, only the elderly andimmunocompromised are at risk,
as if that were reassuring, asif those people were disposable.
(07:14):
That phrase, only some peoplewill die, is everyday eugenics
in one sentence.Psychologically, this is called
psychic numbing.
When confronted with mass harm,especially abstract harm, the
human mind tends to protectitself by shutting down empathy.
The more people at risk, theless we care. And when the
(07:38):
people at risk are alreadymarginalized, it's easier to
justify that emotionaldetachment. But that numbness,
that wasn't accidental. Mediamessaging contributed
deliberately.
Charts, death tolls, policyupdates without names. We got
(07:58):
used to hearing about losswithout feeling it. We were
taught to move on. Compare thatto how individual tragedies are
covered with names, faces,stories that make you care. Mass
death gets spreadsheets.
Individual death gets humanity.You could see the shift in
(08:19):
public language designed tocreate distance. Risk was
reframed as personalresponsibility. Protect the
vulnerable became a sloganinstead of a mandate. Personal
choice became the framework forcollective action.
These weren't neutral phrases.They were psychological tools
(08:40):
designed to transferresponsibility from institutions
to individuals. The personalresponsibility messaging was
particularly insidious. It tooksystemic failures, inadequate
ventilation, lack of paid sickleave, inaccessible health care,
and reframed them as individualchoices. Can't afford to stay
(09:03):
home sick?
That's your poor planning.Caught COVID at your essential
job? You should have been morecareful. This rhetoric didn't
just excuse policy failures. Itmade people blame themselves for
experiencing the consequences ofthose systemic failures.
And it worked. People stoppedexpecting collective solutions
(09:26):
because they'd been trained tosee survival as an individual
problem. Many stopped believingCOVID remains a problem worth
caring about. That's notaccidental numbness. That's
manufactured consent for massabandonment.
Now we're watching some of themost powerful people in
government double down. RFKjunior, a former presidential
(09:50):
candidate, is actively workingto dismantle the Department of
Health and Human Services. TheGOP is pushing legislation that
guts Medicaid, shrinks SocialSecurity, and rolls back
protections for people withdisabilities. These are not
neutral actions. Cutting healthprograms will kill people.
(10:11):
Defunding social safety netswill kill people. In fact, the
defunding of USAID has alreadyled to hundreds of thousands of
deaths worldwide in the last fewmonths. And yet the media often
covers these moves as budgetarymatters, bureaucratic decisions
as controversial but notcatastrophic. That framing is
(10:35):
part of the problem because itdulls urgency. It makes mass
harm look like politicaldisagreement.
Psychologically, that createsdistance. It keeps people from
reacting, resisting, andsometimes even noticing. And
there's a pattern here. Whenpublic services are dismantled,
it's rarely sold as harm. It'spackaged as efficiency.
(10:59):
Waste becomes a buzzword, butwaste in these contexts means
people. People who use services,Medicaid, SNAP, disability,
housing aid. These programs arenot bloated. They're lifelines,
and defunding them doesn't justtighten budgets. It shortens
lives.
The idea that helping people istoo expensive only makes sense
(11:22):
if you've been taught thoselives are worth less, and many
Americans have. Sure. Notovertly, but through repetition,
through budget hearings, throughmedia that frames social care as
a handout, through endlessstories about fraud, not
survival. Those narratives don'tjust justify cuts. They prepare
people to accept theconsequences of those cuts.
(11:46):
And we need to start callingthese actions what they are.
They're not reforms. They'retargeted erasure. Everyday
eugenics. Let's look a littledeeper at health care's
contribution to everydayeugenics.
The idea that some bodies mattermore than others is not new.
It's part of our medicalhistory. Take J. Marion Sims,
(12:09):
often called the father ofgynecology. He experimented on
enslaved black women withoutanesthesia and without consent
because he believed their paindidn't matter.
Or look at the forcedsterilization campaigns
targeting indigenous women,women with disabilities, and
women of color well into thelate twentieth century. These
(12:30):
weren't isolated incidents. Theywere systemic. Today, those
patterns continue in quieterways. Black women in The United
States are still three timesmore likely to die in childbirth
than white women.
People of color routinely reporthaving their pain dismissed in
clinical settings. Trans peopleare denied basic care. People
(12:52):
with disabilities face lifethreatening delays or refusals
of service. These aren'tunfortunate mistakes. They're
symptoms of a medical systembuilt on a hierarchy of human
value.
As medical sociologist RuaBenjamin writes, the legacy of
medical apartheid hasn'tdisappeared. It's simply evolved
into the new Jim Code, wherebias is embedded not just in
(13:15):
doctors, but in thetechnologies, algorithms, and
policies guiding modern care.From pulse oximeters that don't
work on darker skin to racialcorrection factors and kidney
function tests, the message isclear. Some bodies are still
considered default and othersdisposable. These biases aren't
(13:35):
just reflections of prejudice.
They're embedded into clinicaldecision making tools, research
funding, and diagnosticprotocols. Certain conditions
that primarily affect women orracial minorities like
endometriosis, lupus, or sicklecell disease are under
researched, undertreated, andunderfunded. Algorithms used in
(13:57):
hospitals to triage care orallocate transplants sometimes
replicate those same disparitiesbecause they're trained on
biased historical data. And whentechnology reinforces old
inequities, it's harder forpeople to call it
discrimination. It's just ashrug in how the system works.
This makes the insidiouseveryday version of eugenics
(14:19):
harder to fight because it'squiet and systemic. It's wrapped
in math and policy andobjectivity, but it's still
choosing who gets to live welland who is quietly discarded as
too complicated, too expensive,or too inconvenient to live at
all. Media plays a huge role inshaping how we view people who
(14:41):
are aging, disabled, sick, ornonconforming. Think about how
often those characters aremissing from our movies, news,
or advertising. And when they doappear, it's usually in one of a
few ways as inspirational heroesovercoming adversity, as a
stereotypical villain, or asburdens to their families and to
(15:03):
the state.
Those aren't real portrayals.They're scripts. These scripts
are what disability studiesscholars like Rosemarie Garland
Thompson call narrativeprostheses, stories that use
disabled characters as tools togenerate emotion or moral
lessons for able-bodiedaudiences rather than portraying
them as full people. Andrepeated scripts become mental
(15:26):
shortcuts. Psychologists callthese heuristics.
The more we see someoneportrayed a certain way, the
more we start to believe itwithout questioning it. There's
a name for that too, cultivationtheory. It explains how media
shapes our perceptions ofreality over time. If the only
stories we see about disabledpeople frame them as tragic or
(15:47):
dependent, we start to believethat's all they are, and that
belief affects how we vote, howwe speak, how we fund programs,
and how we treat each other. Itdrives the trend into an
everyday eugenics mindset.
Media doesn't just reflectreality, it constructs it. And
it constructs it with eerieconsistency. Consider how many
(16:11):
films and TV shows centercharacters who overcome a
disability just enough to berelatable, but not so much that
they disrupt the able-bodiedmain character's narrative arc.
Or how rare it is to see adisabled character whose story
isn't tragic, medicalized,heroic. That erasure trains
(16:31):
audiences to see disabled lifeas either exceptional or
expendable.
And it's not just fictioneither. In news coverage, people
with disabilities are oftenportrayed as drains on the
system or as rare successstories who defied the odds.
These narrow frames leave noroom for regular complex lives.
(16:53):
And when people can't imagineyour life is worth living,
they're less likely to defendyour right to live it. Let's
talk about ableism for a second.
Ableism isn't just somethingother people do to us. It's
something we do to ourselves.That's what makes it so hard to
spot. People internalize theidea that they're worth less if
(17:15):
they can't work or if they needhelp or if they're in pain. We
say things like, oh, I don'twant to be a burden or I hate
being useless or I'm not likethose people.
That's all internalized ableism.It's the voice of a system that
has taught us our worth has tobe earned. This self blame can
(17:37):
be devastating. It leads todepression, isolation, anxiety,
and sometimes even suicide, andit makes people less likely to
ask for help and to fight fortheir own care. The system
relies on this.
If enough people believe they'rethe problem, not the policy,
then the policy never changes.And that's why so many people
(17:58):
hide their disabilities or delaycare. Sometimes they keep
working long after their bodiestell them to stop. Shame does
what policy enforcement doesn'thave to. It makes people
regulate themselves to apologizefor needing time off or to feel
guilty for using mobility aids.
They shrink their own existencebecause the system has told them
(18:19):
they take up too much space. Andthis internal policing shows up
in how we talk also. Up. Atleast I'm not on welfare or I
just need to get better and getback to work. These are not
harmless phrases.
They're the echoes of a culturethat has told us over and over
again, rest is laziness, need isweakness, and survival must be
(18:42):
earned. Looking back ateverything we've talked about so
far in this episode, it'scertainly tempting to think,
well, that's just how thingsare. We can't change anything.
But that thought process is bydesign. The propaganda of
eugenics and the twentiethcentury didn't end.
It just got smarter. Now ithides in our language,
(19:04):
headlines, bureaucratic speak.It hides in the way we talk
about budgets, health care, anddifficult decisions. Terms like
cost effectiveness, riskmanagement, triage are used to
mask decisions about who gets tolive. And most of us don't even
realize that's what we'reagreeing to when we repeat these
(19:25):
phrases.
This kind of language sanitizesharm. It makes preventable death
sound like math. It keeps ourconversations centered on
resources instead of people. Andonce those terms are in place,
the public debate narrows.Instead of asking, why can't we
provide care for everyone?
People start asking, who can weafford to save? There's a
(19:49):
psychological term called moraldisengagement that describes how
people justify harmful behaviorwhen it benefits a group they
belong to or when they feelpowerless to stop it. We're
seeing that now on a mass scale.People aren't necessarily
inherently evil. They'reoverwhelmed.
And overwhelmed people oftenreach for familiar framing to
(20:13):
make sense of chaos. And that'sexactly what propaganda
exploits. Media contributes tothe problem by repeating those
frames. Flattening policydebates into budget fights are
both sides' coverage. Publichealth becomes politics, and
harm becomes opinion.
Lives become numbers and ascrolling chyron. But we are not
(20:33):
powerless. We've just beentrained to feel that way.
Propaganda numbs you, butculture can wake you up. So what
can we do?
We start by seeing clearly. Wename the systems for exactly
what they are. We stop callingthem broken and start calling
(20:54):
them intentional. We listen todisabled activists who've been
naming this problem for decades.Follow organizations like ADAPT,
the Disability JusticeCollective, and local disabled
led groups.
Amplify their work instead ofspeaking over it. Concretely,
(21:14):
this means voting with policyand survival in mind. Support
candidates who back universalhealth care, universal basic
income, and robust disabilityservices. Vote in local and
midterm elections where yourschool board and city council
decisions directly affectaccessibility and services. Show
(21:37):
up to town halls and budgetmeetings.
They're not glamorous, butthey're where life and death
decisions get made. Supportmutual aid networks that keep
people alive when the statewon't. Find your local
disability mutual aid group,community fridges, or harm
reduction organizations. Donatemoney if you have it, time if
(21:58):
you don't. Learn about thedisabled people in your
community and what they actuallyneed, not what you think they
need.
Change how you talk. Stop usingproductivity language to
describe human worth. Whensomeone says, I feel useless,
don't respond with the kneejerk, you're not useless. You
contribute so much. That justreinforces the productivity
(22:21):
trap.
Try responding with your worthisn't about what you produce.
Instead, challenge ableistlanguage when you hear it,
including your own. At work,push for real accommodation
policies, not just legalcompliance. Annotate for
flexible schedules, remote work,and inclusive hiring practices.
(22:44):
If you're in health care,education, or social services,
question policies that createbarriers.
If you're in media, examinewhose stories get told and how.
Let's rewire how we see eachother and stop defining people
by productivity. Stop treatingcare as charity. Remember that
(23:05):
being alive is enough reason towant someone to live. This isn't
easy work.
It takes constant awareness andconstant correction. But the
alternative, accepting everydayeugenics as normal, isn't
something we can afford. Not ifwe want a world where everyone
matters and not just the strong,not just the well, not just the
(23:27):
deserving, everyone. So askyourself, who benefits from a
world where care is conditional?Who profits from our shame?
Who gains power when we acceptthat only certain bodies deserve
comfort, support, and time toheal? Once you start asking
those questions, the logic ofthe whole system starts to
(23:49):
crack. So we're not just upagainst a policy. We're up
against a story. A story told somany times that it feels like
common sense, but it's not.
It's an ideology, and anideology can be improved and
replaced. That replacementhappens through daily practice.
Every time you center access inevent planning, encourage
(24:11):
masking, encourage wheelchairaccessibility, make sure
everyone is able to participatein the event. Every time you
choose political candidatesbased on their disability
policies, not just theirelectability. Every time you
support disabled ownedbusinesses or hire disabled
colleagues or refuse to letconversations about difficult
(24:35):
people or expensiveaccommodations go unchallenged,
it builds.
Every conversation that centerscare over convenience, every
vote cast with someone else'ssurvival in mind, every decision
to value people for theirhumanity instead of their labor,
that's resistance. Andresistance matters because the
alternative is numbness. It'sletting the machine run while
(24:58):
telling ourselves we can't stopit, but we can. The spell breaks
every time someone names what'sreally happening. And once you
see it, you can't unsee it.
You can only decide whether youwant to be part of it or help
tear it down. Thanks forlistening to this week's
PsyberSpace. I'm your host,Leslie Poston, signing off. And
(25:19):
as always, until next time, staycurious. And don't forget to
subscribe so that you don't missa week, and maybe send it to a
friend so more people startunderstanding their world.
Thanks for listening.
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host,
Leslie Poston. This week, we'retalking about something people
often don't want to hear becauseit's uncomfortable. It makes us
look at ourselves and at thesystems we live in, but it's
important. We're talking abouteveryday eugenics, not the
history textbook version withthe swastikas and gas chambers,
(00:35):
not just pseudoscientific horrorfrom a century ago, although
that's all part of it.
We're talking about the quietkind, the kind we barely notice,
the kind of eugenics that'sbaked into policies, health
care, our language, media, andeven our self worth, the kind
(00:55):
that decides without saying soout loud that some people don't
deserve to live. Everydayeugenics is what happens when a
society decides again and againthat people who can't work or
who can't work enough or whomight need a little support to
survive, don't count. It's whathappens when we treat health
(01:17):
care as a privilege tied toemployment, not a right tied to
existence. It's what happenswhen our government shrugs and
says, only some people will dieduring a pandemic. And it's what
happens when we let that slide,when we start to believe it's
okay.
Let's talk about how we got hereand what's really going on
(01:39):
beneath the surface. We'retaught from an early age that
our value comes fromproductivity. It's in our school
system, our work culture, ourinsurance plans even. The phrase
hardworking American has becomea shorthand for deserving human,
and that's a problem. Thismindset starts early.
(02:03):
Think about how schools handledisabled students. The pressure
to mainstream the constanttesting to prove accommodation
needs, the way IEPs becomenegotiations about what a child
can contribute rather than whatthey need to thrive. Kids learn
quickly that being differentmeans justifying your existence.
(02:25):
The truth is these ideas didn'tcome from nowhere. We're
conditioned to believe thatstruggle is noble only when it
leads to productivity.
Rest, healing, or dependence areseen as moral failings. That's
why people brag about workingthrough the flu, but hesitate to
say they took time to recover.That mindset is part of a
(02:49):
psychological pattern that linksvalue to output even when the
output is unsustainable ordamaging. Even the Americans
with Disabilities Act,groundbreaking as it was,
reinforces this logic. Itrequires reasonable
accommodation, but only if youcan still perform essential job
functions.
(03:09):
It protects your right to work,not your right to exist without
working. Employers routinelychallenge accommodations by
questioning whether someone canbe productive enough to justify
the expense. And it's not justworkplaces. Families absorb this
logic of everyday eugenics too.How often do we hear relatives
(03:30):
described as contributing orpulling their weight?
How often do disabled familymembers internalize shame about
needing care? The productivitytrap doesn't stop at the office
door. It shapes how we seeourselves in every relationship.
In most developed countries,health care is a shared
(03:52):
responsibility. In The UnitedStates, it's a gatekeeping tool.
You have to prove you deserveit, and if you don't, you're
left out completely. If thatsounds extreme, consider how
common it is here to see phraseslike they brought it on
themselves or they should haveworked harder. When health care
is tied to employment, whathappens to the people who can't
(04:14):
work or who work part time orwho are caregivers, parents,
disabled, retired, orchronically ill? They're
punished by the system, and notsubtly, not slowly, but with
real consequences like goingwithout treatment, dying in
debt, or becoming homeless aftera medical crisis. That isn't
(04:36):
just bad policy.
That's a belief system, a beliefthat says your body only matters
if it produces. It's a culturalnarrative reinforced by decades
of political messaging and mediaframing. We're told that health
care is scarce, that there's notenough for everyone, that
covering people who can't paywould hurt the rest of us. But
(04:59):
that's a lie and a powerful one.And when that lie is repeated
enough, people start to believethat letting someone die is
unfortunate but acceptable,especially if that someone is
disabled, old, poor, orstruggling with addiction or
black or indigenous.
(05:22):
This isn't about bad doctors orevil politicians. It's about a
system designed to stretchpeople to their limits and then
blame them when they break. Youcan see it in how long people
are expected to wait for care,in how quickly coverage is
denied, and in how easily healthbenefits are lost. Even the
(05:45):
language around health careaccess reinforces it. We talk
about consumers and plans, notpatients and care.
We talk about overuse instead ofunmet needs. Black women in The
US are three times as morelikely to die in childbirth than
white women. People of colorroutinely report having their
(06:07):
pain dismissed in clinicalsettings. Trans people are
denied basic health care. Peoplewith disabilities face life
threatening delays or outrightrefusals of service.
From pulse oximeters that don'twork on darker skin to racial
correction factors and kidneyfunction test, the message is
(06:28):
clear. Some bodies areconsidered default and others
disposable. And for all the talkof scarcity, the money is there.
The political will is not. Whenpeople say the system is
overwhelmed, they're oftenmasking the fact that the system
is exclusive by design.
The overwhelmed part, that's us,the people trying to survive
(06:50):
inside it. During the earlyyears of this ongoing COVID
nineteen pandemic, we saw thislogic play out in real time.
Federal officials, people at thehighest levels, said things
like, only the elderly andimmunocompromised are at risk,
as if that were reassuring, asif those people were disposable.
(07:14):
That phrase, only some peoplewill die, is everyday eugenics
in one sentence.Psychologically, this is called
psychic numbing.
When confronted with mass harm,especially abstract harm, the
human mind tends to protectitself by shutting down empathy.
The more people at risk, theless we care. And when the
(07:38):
people at risk are alreadymarginalized, it's easier to
justify that emotionaldetachment. But that numbness,
that wasn't accidental. Mediamessaging contributed
deliberately.
Charts, death tolls, policyupdates without names. We got
(07:58):
used to hearing about losswithout feeling it. We were
taught to move on. Compare thatto how individual tragedies are
covered with names, faces,stories that make you care. Mass
death gets spreadsheets.
Individual death gets humanity.You could see the shift in
(08:19):
public language designed tocreate distance. Risk was
reframed as personalresponsibility. Protect the
vulnerable became a sloganinstead of a mandate. Personal
choice became the framework forcollective action.
These weren't neutral phrases.They were psychological tools
(08:40):
designed to transferresponsibility from institutions
to individuals. The personalresponsibility messaging was
particularly insidious. It tooksystemic failures, inadequate
ventilation, lack of paid sickleave, inaccessible health care,
and reframed them as individualchoices. Can't afford to stay
(09:03):
home sick?
That's your poor planning.Caught COVID at your essential
job? You should have been morecareful. This rhetoric didn't
just excuse policy failures. Itmade people blame themselves for
experiencing the consequences ofthose systemic failures.
And it worked. People stoppedexpecting collective solutions
(09:26):
because they'd been trained tosee survival as an individual
problem. Many stopped believingCOVID remains a problem worth
caring about. That's notaccidental numbness. That's
manufactured consent for massabandonment.
Now we're watching some of themost powerful people in
government double down. RFKjunior, a former presidential
(09:50):
candidate, is actively workingto dismantle the Department of
Health and Human Services. TheGOP is pushing legislation that
guts Medicaid, shrinks SocialSecurity, and rolls back
protections for people withdisabilities. These are not
neutral actions. Cutting healthprograms will kill people.
(10:11):
Defunding social safety netswill kill people. In fact, the
defunding of USAID has alreadyled to hundreds of thousands of
deaths worldwide in the last fewmonths. And yet the media often
covers these moves as budgetarymatters, bureaucratic decisions
as controversial but notcatastrophic. That framing is
(10:35):
part of the problem because itdulls urgency. It makes mass
harm look like politicaldisagreement.
Psychologically, that createsdistance. It keeps people from
reacting, resisting, andsometimes even noticing. And
there's a pattern here. Whenpublic services are dismantled,
it's rarely sold as harm. It'spackaged as efficiency.
(10:59):
Waste becomes a buzzword, butwaste in these contexts means
people. People who use services,Medicaid, SNAP, disability,
housing aid. These programs arenot bloated. They're lifelines,
and defunding them doesn't justtighten budgets. It shortens
lives.
The idea that helping people istoo expensive only makes sense
(11:22):
if you've been taught thoselives are worth less, and many
Americans have. Sure. Notovertly, but through repetition,
through budget hearings, throughmedia that frames social care as
a handout, through endlessstories about fraud, not
survival. Those narratives don'tjust justify cuts. They prepare
people to accept theconsequences of those cuts.
(11:46):
And we need to start callingthese actions what they are.
They're not reforms. They'retargeted erasure. Everyday
eugenics. Let's look a littledeeper at health care's
contribution to everydayeugenics.
The idea that some bodies mattermore than others is not new.
It's part of our medicalhistory. Take J. Marion Sims,
(12:09):
often called the father ofgynecology. He experimented on
enslaved black women withoutanesthesia and without consent
because he believed their paindidn't matter.
Or look at the forcedsterilization campaigns
targeting indigenous women,women with disabilities, and
women of color well into thelate twentieth century. These
(12:30):
weren't isolated incidents. Theywere systemic. Today, those
patterns continue in quieterways. Black women in The United
States are still three timesmore likely to die in childbirth
than white women.
People of color routinely reporthaving their pain dismissed in
clinical settings. Trans peopleare denied basic care. People
(12:52):
with disabilities face lifethreatening delays or refusals
of service. These aren'tunfortunate mistakes. They're
symptoms of a medical systembuilt on a hierarchy of human
value.
As medical sociologist RuaBenjamin writes, the legacy of
medical apartheid hasn'tdisappeared. It's simply evolved
into the new Jim Code, wherebias is embedded not just in
(13:15):
doctors, but in thetechnologies, algorithms, and
policies guiding modern care.From pulse oximeters that don't
work on darker skin to racialcorrection factors and kidney
function tests, the message isclear. Some bodies are still
considered default and othersdisposable. These biases aren't
(13:35):
just reflections of prejudice.
They're embedded into clinicaldecision making tools, research
funding, and diagnosticprotocols. Certain conditions
that primarily affect women orracial minorities like
endometriosis, lupus, or sicklecell disease are under
researched, undertreated, andunderfunded. Algorithms used in
(13:57):
hospitals to triage care orallocate transplants sometimes
replicate those same disparitiesbecause they're trained on
biased historical data. And whentechnology reinforces old
inequities, it's harder forpeople to call it
discrimination. It's just ashrug in how the system works.
This makes the insidiouseveryday version of eugenics
(14:19):
harder to fight because it'squiet and systemic. It's wrapped
in math and policy andobjectivity, but it's still
choosing who gets to live welland who is quietly discarded as
too complicated, too expensive,or too inconvenient to live at
all. Media plays a huge role inshaping how we view people who
(14:41):
are aging, disabled, sick, ornonconforming. Think about how
often those characters aremissing from our movies, news,
or advertising. And when they doappear, it's usually in one of a
few ways as inspirational heroesovercoming adversity, as a
stereotypical villain, or asburdens to their families and to
(15:03):
the state.
Those aren't real portrayals.They're scripts. These scripts
are what disability studiesscholars like Rosemarie Garland
Thompson call narrativeprostheses, stories that use
disabled characters as tools togenerate emotion or moral
lessons for able-bodiedaudiences rather than portraying
them as full people. Andrepeated scripts become mental
(15:26):
shortcuts. Psychologists callthese heuristics.
The more we see someoneportrayed a certain way, the
more we start to believe itwithout questioning it. There's
a name for that too, cultivationtheory. It explains how media
shapes our perceptions ofreality over time. If the only
stories we see about disabledpeople frame them as tragic or
(15:47):
dependent, we start to believethat's all they are, and that
belief affects how we vote, howwe speak, how we fund programs,
and how we treat each other. Itdrives the trend into an
everyday eugenics mindset.
Media doesn't just reflectreality, it constructs it. And
it constructs it with eerieconsistency. Consider how many
(16:11):
films and TV shows centercharacters who overcome a
disability just enough to berelatable, but not so much that
they disrupt the able-bodiedmain character's narrative arc.
Or how rare it is to see adisabled character whose story
isn't tragic, medicalized,heroic. That erasure trains
(16:31):
audiences to see disabled lifeas either exceptional or
expendable.
And it's not just fictioneither. In news coverage, people
with disabilities are oftenportrayed as drains on the
system or as rare successstories who defied the odds.
These narrow frames leave noroom for regular complex lives.
(16:53):
And when people can't imagineyour life is worth living,
they're less likely to defendyour right to live it. Let's
talk about ableism for a second.
Ableism isn't just somethingother people do to us. It's
something we do to ourselves.That's what makes it so hard to
spot. People internalize theidea that they're worth less if
(17:15):
they can't work or if they needhelp or if they're in pain. We
say things like, oh, I don'twant to be a burden or I hate
being useless or I'm not likethose people.
That's all internalized ableism.It's the voice of a system that
has taught us our worth has tobe earned. This self blame can
(17:37):
be devastating. It leads todepression, isolation, anxiety,
and sometimes even suicide, andit makes people less likely to
ask for help and to fight fortheir own care. The system
relies on this.
If enough people believe they'rethe problem, not the policy,
then the policy never changes.And that's why so many people
(17:58):
hide their disabilities or delaycare. Sometimes they keep
working long after their bodiestell them to stop. Shame does
what policy enforcement doesn'thave to. It makes people
regulate themselves to apologizefor needing time off or to feel
guilty for using mobility aids.
They shrink their own existencebecause the system has told them
(18:19):
they take up too much space. Andthis internal policing shows up
in how we talk also. Up. Atleast I'm not on welfare or I
just need to get better and getback to work. These are not
harmless phrases.
They're the echoes of a culturethat has told us over and over
again, rest is laziness, need isweakness, and survival must be
(18:42):
earned. Looking back ateverything we've talked about so
far in this episode, it'scertainly tempting to think,
well, that's just how thingsare. We can't change anything.
But that thought process is bydesign. The propaganda of
eugenics and the twentiethcentury didn't end.
It just got smarter. Now ithides in our language,
(19:04):
headlines, bureaucratic speak.It hides in the way we talk
about budgets, health care, anddifficult decisions. Terms like
cost effectiveness, riskmanagement, triage are used to
mask decisions about who gets tolive. And most of us don't even
realize that's what we'reagreeing to when we repeat these
(19:25):
phrases.
This kind of language sanitizesharm. It makes preventable death
sound like math. It keeps ourconversations centered on
resources instead of people. Andonce those terms are in place,
the public debate narrows.Instead of asking, why can't we
provide care for everyone?
People start asking, who can weafford to save? There's a
(19:49):
psychological term called moraldisengagement that describes how
people justify harmful behaviorwhen it benefits a group they
belong to or when they feelpowerless to stop it. We're
seeing that now on a mass scale.People aren't necessarily
inherently evil. They'reoverwhelmed.
And overwhelmed people oftenreach for familiar framing to
(20:13):
make sense of chaos. And that'sexactly what propaganda
exploits. Media contributes tothe problem by repeating those
frames. Flattening policydebates into budget fights are
both sides' coverage. Publichealth becomes politics, and
harm becomes opinion.
Lives become numbers and ascrolling chyron. But we are not
(20:33):
powerless. We've just beentrained to feel that way.
Propaganda numbs you, butculture can wake you up. So what
can we do?
We start by seeing clearly. Wename the systems for exactly
what they are. We stop callingthem broken and start calling
(20:54):
them intentional. We listen todisabled activists who've been
naming this problem for decades.Follow organizations like ADAPT,
the Disability JusticeCollective, and local disabled
led groups.
Amplify their work instead ofspeaking over it. Concretely,
(21:14):
this means voting with policyand survival in mind. Support
candidates who back universalhealth care, universal basic
income, and robust disabilityservices. Vote in local and
midterm elections where yourschool board and city council
decisions directly affectaccessibility and services. Show
(21:37):
up to town halls and budgetmeetings.
They're not glamorous, butthey're where life and death
decisions get made. Supportmutual aid networks that keep
people alive when the statewon't. Find your local
disability mutual aid group,community fridges, or harm
reduction organizations. Donatemoney if you have it, time if
(21:58):
you don't. Learn about thedisabled people in your
community and what they actuallyneed, not what you think they
need.
Change how you talk. Stop usingproductivity language to
describe human worth. Whensomeone says, I feel useless,
don't respond with the kneejerk, you're not useless. You
contribute so much. That justreinforces the productivity
(22:21):
trap.
Try responding with your worthisn't about what you produce.
Instead, challenge ableistlanguage when you hear it,
including your own. At work,push for real accommodation
policies, not just legalcompliance. Annotate for
flexible schedules, remote work,and inclusive hiring practices.
(22:44):
If you're in health care,education, or social services,
question policies that createbarriers.
If you're in media, examinewhose stories get told and how.
Let's rewire how we see eachother and stop defining people
by productivity. Stop treatingcare as charity. Remember that
(23:05):
being alive is enough reason towant someone to live. This isn't
easy work.
It takes constant awareness andconstant correction. But the
alternative, accepting everydayeugenics as normal, isn't
something we can afford. Not ifwe want a world where everyone
matters and not just the strong,not just the well, not just the
(23:27):
deserving, everyone. So askyourself, who benefits from a
world where care is conditional?Who profits from our shame?
Who gains power when we acceptthat only certain bodies deserve
comfort, support, and time toheal? Once you start asking
those questions, the logic ofthe whole system starts to
(23:49):
crack. So we're not just upagainst a policy. We're up
against a story. A story told somany times that it feels like
common sense, but it's not.
It's an ideology, and anideology can be improved and
replaced. That replacementhappens through daily practice.
Every time you center access inevent planning, encourage
(24:11):
masking, encourage wheelchairaccessibility, make sure
everyone is able to participatein the event. Every time you
choose political candidatesbased on their disability
policies, not just theirelectability. Every time you
support disabled ownedbusinesses or hire disabled
colleagues or refuse to letconversations about difficult
(24:35):
people or expensiveaccommodations go unchallenged,
it builds.
Every conversation that centerscare over convenience, every
vote cast with someone else'ssurvival in mind, every decision
to value people for theirhumanity instead of their labor,
that's resistance. Andresistance matters because the
alternative is numbness. It'sletting the machine run while
(24:58):
telling ourselves we can't stopit, but we can. The spell breaks
every time someone names what'sreally happening. And once you
see it, you can't unsee it.
You can only decide whether youwant to be part of it or help
tear it down. Thanks forlistening to this week's
PsyberSpace. I'm your host,Leslie Poston, signing off. And
(25:19):
as always, until next time, staycurious. And don't forget to
subscribe so that you don't missa week, and maybe send it to a
friend so more people startunderstanding their world.
Thanks for listening.
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