Affective Eugenics: Education, Political Polarization, and the Affective Sorting of Futurity

This conceptual-speculative article examines political polarization as a deliberate strategy of affective governance in an age defined by mass dispossession and ecological collapse. We argue that polarization should not be treated as a temporary crisis to be resolved but as a governing technology that organizes fragmentation, consolidates elite power, and deflects attention away from demands for structural transformation. To theorize this dynamic, we introduce the concept of affective eugenics , describing how affective governance legitimizes privatized futures for the few while rendering the many surplus through a sentimentalist and biopolitical sorting of affective capacity. Within education, this affective sorting materializes as a triage of feeling: elite institutions cultivate planetary crisis managers, middle-class students are conditioned for resilient compliance, and underfunded schools are left to manage disposability. We conclude by outlining the educational implications of affective eugenics and calling for praxes of affective de-settlement, refusal, and opacity that unsettle these hierarchies.