- Welcome back to "Word of
the Day with Lance Conrad."
Today's word is dismay.
Let me tell you a story.
Dismay can be noun or verb.
It means alarm, distress,
or to cause someone alarm or distress.
The roots are kinda fun on this one.
'Dis' means a negation,
taking something away.
'May' actually shares a Germanic
root with the word 'might'.
So imagine how you would feel
if someone took away your
power or sense of security.
You would feel dismay.
For a long time in American history,
women did not have the right to vote,
which no doubt dismayed
many women in that time.
That was fixed with the 19th Amendment,
which was passed in 1920, 100 years ago.
And there was much celebration.
However, there was
significantly less celebration
surrounding the first woman
to ever run for president.
Victoria Claflin Woodhull,
was not an ideal candidate.
She was radical in many of her views,
including being in favor of eugenics.
Even other women's right's
activists, like Susan B. Anthony,
viewed her with great dismay.
She named Frederick Douglas,
the famous abolitionist
as her running partner.
He didn't bother to respond to the call.
Still most historians agree
that she still qualifies
as the first female candidate
for president in the U.S.
Even more incredible, she ran in 1872,
48 years before women
got the right to vote.
(upbeat music)
The word we're talking
about today is dismay.
Now dismay, we use the
story of the first female
to ever run for president.
And really it's quite an inspiring story
or at least it could be, right.
They were so close,
because this woman Woodhull
and her sister were actually
the first female stockbrokers,
right, on Wall Street.
They were strong suffragists,
you know, fought for women's rights
and all these things where,
yeah they really could
have been right up there
with all these other
women's rights people,
but they were just a little
bit too far out there.
They had some fairly wild ideas,
including, it was mentioned
in the script, eugenics.
She believed in the forced sterilization
of those that she deemed
unworthy to breed.
Well, you know, there's
always this question,
right, of at what point a negative
takes away a person's positives.
'Cause you can look at all
the things that she did
that were very positive for
women and the women's movement.
And yeah, how crazy do you have to be
before you take away
those accomplishments?
And you know what, I feel
like forced sterilizations
and eugenics, that does
in fact cross that line
and I'm very sad to say it.
But yeah, I think that's probably
where I would draw that line.
- Well, the troubling thing is how common
a belief in eugenics was, at the time
and continued to be actually
well into the 20th century,
even and--
- That was the whole basis of Hitlers--
- [Guest] Yeah oh absolutely.
- All of that was the whole idea of trying
to improve the human gene pool
by essentially cutting some people out,
you know, trimming the tree so to speak
which is just, it's horrifying.
- And even here in the United States,
I mean a lot of--
Eugenics is this kind of
boogie man that pops up a lot
when you're digging in
to any historical figure,
when you get into their personal beliefs,
a lot of them end up dabbling
in this very unsavory world of eugenics.
One of the big ones actually,
one of the major proponents
in the United States
was Charles Lindbergh.
- Oh.
- Yeah, huge, I mean, very unfortunate.
So not to detract from the positives
and from the brave and innovative
and positive things that
these people have done,
but you will occasionally
run into some of these,
some of these unfortunate
skeletons in the closet.
- I think it's just something,
I understand the temptation,
especially with these very cerebral people
who see just kinda the way society's going
and well we need to guide this, right.
There is a fundamental flaw
in that kind of thinking
and history bares it out.
You can't breed for
excellence and intelligence,
any time we've tried,
it's mostly end up with horrible
inbreeding and class systems
that are just oppressive
where neither class actually excels.
It stagnates human nature.
- It's a perfect
demonstration of the dangers
of pseudoscience, right.
Because eugenics, at
least in theory right,
there were a lot of people
looking at it and saying,
"In theory, per my understanding
of how genetics works,
"this should work perfectly
and it should vastly benefit
"the human race"
and instead leads to atrocities
and to gross human rights violations,
and I mean gross in multiple senses.
You had a lot of these
unfortunate pseudosciences
that popped up or have
popped up over the centuries.
Phrenology was another one,
that unfortunately generated
a market for human skulls,
that obviously and dramatically violated
a variety of ethical boundaries.
- One that's kind of a strange one
because it's still a very active part
and even still respected,
but almost started as a pseudoscience,
was the very measuring of
intelligence, the IQ test.
It started out, the idea behind
it was at least you know,
yes we want to find a way
of measuring intelligence,
but the actual application
that the actual test
they start out with and the
uses that came out of that,
were just so bizarre.
It was used as a, well
first the tests were written
to favor certain people in classes
and then those results were used to prove
that those people in classes
and races were in fact better.
We tested it, we've proved
it, these ones are better.
Well you wrote the test for them.
So yeah, maybe not
inherently a pseudoscience
but definitely the way they went at it,
was definitely a pseudoscience.
- There are these unfortunate
misapplications of science
and particularly science experiments.
One that's very famous,
that you've probably seen
various articles and Ted Talks
and who knows what over
the last few years,
is the marshmallow test.
- Oh yeah.
Self control.
- Self control, you give
a child a marshmallow
and you tell them that if
they can wait 15 minutes
without eating the marshmallow,
they get another marshmallow, right
and people have taken that
as this fundamental principle
of if you do not have
self-control you are doomed
because these kids that weren't able
to wait on the marshmallow,
then didn't perform as well in school,
they didn't have as, you
know didn't test as highly
on the blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
What the test was actually meant to show
was that anyone can
improve their self-control.
The point of it was they had,
they did the marshmallow thing
and, you know, some of the
kids ate the marshmallow,
some of them waited and
then they sat the kids down
and said, alright well try
thinking about something else,
try telling a story with the marshmallow
and taught them these coping
strategies for dealing
with their impatience
and after just very brief coaching,
every one of the kids was able
to pass the marshmallow test.
And so it was this illustration
of anybody can do this,
anybody can improve their behavior,
they just need a little bit of coaching
and instead it was interpreted as,
if you don't get this right the
first time, you're hopeless.
- Which in many ways
is an excellent parallel for eugenics, so.
- [Guest] Yes.
Eugenics is garbage.
- Amen.
(both laughing)
