Examination Day

The premise of “Examination Day” explores the impacts of a state-sanctioned eugenics program taken to its extreme. Parents and government workers alike are coerced into accepting an unethical system that has systematized the death of children if they are deemed too intelligent.

Although “Examination Day” relies heavily on Cold War-era science fiction tropes of the 1950s, the story can also be read as a response to the American and Nazi Germany eugenics programs of the early and mid-20th century. These eugenics programs, like the Government regime described in “Examination Day,” were technocratic, mechanized, and bureaucratic. As part of a government program, targeted subjects would be administered IQ tests. If their IQ was deemed too low, they would be sterilized, institutionalized, or in the case of Nazi Germany, executed. These were terrible, immoral acts that were justified using “scientific” rationales. Philosopher Hannah Arendt would later describe those who carried out such terrible acts under the guise of simply “doing their jobs” within an immoral system as “the banality of evil” (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1964). Such a system relies on individual actors within it to do immoral acts to further its collective survival, based on false notions of superiority and patriotism.