The Long Way Back to Ourselves

7.3

The Three Branches: Liberal, Socialist, Evolutionary

This episode follows a single unsettling fact: Sweden, a functioning democracy with a free press and independent courts, forcibly sterilized roughly 63,000 people between the 1930s and 1970s, unexamined until a 1997 newspaper series broke the story. You learn how humanist thought split into three branches after authority moved into the individual, and the episode tests whether liberal humanism's checks and balances prevented such abuses. The 1927 US Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, where Justice Holmes wrote "three generations of imbeciles are enough," shows courts confirmed rather than blocked these programs for decades. Britain's eugenics movement never produced sterilization legislation, a gap the episode uses to test why some places radicalized and others didn't.