Was Andrew Carnegie Right? (Darwin, beliefs, evolution, America)

[Sunstone]

Andrew Carnegie seems to have been influenced by Social Darwinism, as witnessed by this quote:

While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.

– Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919), “Wealth,” in the North American Review, June 1889.



Was Carnegie right about the human condition? Are his beliefs supported by the Theory of Evolution?

[painted wolf]

Spoken like a true steel barron.

However it is important to note that while he was a ruthless businessman, he was also a great philanthropist. He funded schools, museums and the like to the tune of billions of dollars.
He still does actually.

He believed that it was the responcibility of the rich to give back to the rest of humanity.
He personally offered to give the people of the Philippines 20 million dollars so they could buy their indipendance from Spain and not be subjected to US imperialism. The US bought the Philippines anyway.

Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. Exalted beyond this, as it sometimes is, it remains Caliban still and still plays the beast. My aspirations take a higher flight. Mine be it to have contributed to the enlightenment and the joys of the mind, to the things of the spirit, to all that tends to bring into the lives of the toilers of Pittsburgh sweetness and light. I hold this the noblest possible use of wealth.

Carnegie was a complex man.

wa:do