But there are plenty of people who see Darwinism as an invalid idea — one which has little purpose other than to serve as a tool for totalitarians.
We’ll see how valid or invalid it is at the end of this year at the 2019 Darwin Awards show.
They are benighted people. I'm truly sorry for them.
I'd argue it's original teaching (yeah, I know, Darwin wasn't the first to believe in natural selection, but he was the first to make it a popular belief) was all about stopping the abolitionist movement that was going on in Europe. So not so much totalitarian (i.e. not just so a few leaders can control the masses). It was all about justifying the average Joe being able to control his fellow man.
Some attempt should be made to differentiate “Social Darwinism” from plain old Darwinism. Social Darwinism was seized upon by the British aristocracy and its intellectual lackeys as a justification for the various tyrannies they unleashed against their 3rd World colonies and was soon taken up by every street corner thug sociopath and narcissistic political enforcer goon on the planet. Under the Social Darwinist “Uber Mensch” doctrine, only the fittest are deserving of survival. In the dog eat dog, law of the jungle world of the 19th century, this doctrine may have had some traction. In the Age of Info, however, ectomorphic muscle mass applied to the urban modern world’s problems are knuckle dragging Neanderthal and a straight up non-survival liability. The Social Darwinists’ bumper sticker “Survival of the Fittest” has been non-voluntarily replaced by something more civilized - “Survival of the Smartest”. Being not so smart, the Social Darwinists of today are on the fast track to oblivion.