Greedy Sexist Religious Bigots
Why would you want to read a 9,500-word introduction of a book that is not complete? The answer is, because it is an encapsulation. The six meaty chapters that will follow are the "deep dive" into the topics explained in the intro, but there is a ton to learn about world history, if you are so inclined, in this document. It will leave you wanting more, yes, but it won't exactly leave you hanging, if that makes sense. Anyway, it's the weekend, so chill from social media and give it a gander, if you please.
Greedy Sexist Religious Bigots
-a history book
by
James Fell
Introduction
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
—Oscar Wilde
The Bible is the writings of several men saying it’s the Word of God. There could have been women involved in the process, but the men said no. Men have had a problem including women in things other than squeezing large people out of small orifices for some time now.
Out of all the fucked-up shit we did, the way we treated women qualifies as most fornicated, because patriarchal bullshit oppressed half the population for almost all of history, with much room for improvement remaining. Overdoing the God stuff also ranks high.
There is little need for a scorecard. This isn’t the Oppression Olympics. The majority of humanity has been screwed over by a merciless minority since a hairy smelly buff dude bashed the brains out of his rivals with a Wildebeest femur, declaring himself Penis Numero Uno of the cave and getting all the Daryl Hannah he desired. Ruthlessness and brutality combined with a yearning to control others often pays off; this survival-of-the-fittest-on-steroids reality has marred Homo sapiens’ path since troglodyte times.
We are a species that encoded the idea of “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing” into our genes. The stimulus-response nature of our biological being prompted us to keep engaging in that which generated a swift positive result, and to Hell with anyone or anything that stood in our way. There are and have been plenty of nice people, but it’s often the meanest motherfuckers who make the rules . . . and make history. This stark reality led to humanity perpetuating a series of six species-level failures that plagued our existence and doomed we bipeds to mediocrity on the precipice of self-destruction.
What is a species-level failure? What are the chronic fuck ups we cannot seem to help but perpetuate? Behold.
1. We kept women down
2. We put too much faith in God
3. We embraced bigotry
4. We got too greedy
5. We fought against facts
6. We didn’t worry about the future
Not everyone sees these as chronic failures of our species, however. Rather than view them as fucked up, many powerful people embrace such actions as reasonable, true, and pure, which is why they persist.
And so we must ask the question: Who gets to decide what is and is not “fucked up”?
The Truth is Rarely Pure
In 1895, famed author Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for the crime of being gay, and it killed him.
Born in Dublin to a prominent Irish family, Wilde was educated at Trinity College and Oxford before becoming one of the most popular playwrights of the time in London. He’d performed his aristocratic familial obligation by marrying a highborn woman and impregnating her twice to fulfill the requirement for “an heir and a spare.” If he’d kept the gay stuff on the down-low, his dalliances would have been permissible, a benefit of being upper class. Homosexual acts were a criminal offense, but normal rules of society didn’t apply to men of his station. Unfortunately for Oscar, his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, preferred to be out and proud.
While Wilde was not overly discreet, Alfred flaunted his sexual orientation like San Francisco in June. Alfred hadn’t done his duty of marrying and having children, because ew, girls. Alfred’s dad, John Douglas, who held the title of Marquess of Queensberry, was not impressed. John was one of those “manly men.” If you’re familiar with “Queensberry Rules” of boxing, he’s the one who sponsored their creation. The Marquess was a brutish conservative who relished punching men’s faces, not kissing them.
As parents are often wont to do, he blamed the lover, not his own child. Queensberry threatened to “thrash” Wilde for his relationship with his son and made a public accusation of sodomy against the writer. Oscar retaliated by making the ill-advised decision to prosecute the Marquess for criminal libel. Of course, truth is a defense against libel, so John hired private investigators to confirm Oscar’s homosexuality. And find them they did, bringing evidence that Wilde had engaged in sex acts with at least a dozen men. The libel charge was dropped, and instead Wilde found himself facing prosecution for “The love that dare not speak its name,” a line from a poem Alfred wrote. Oscar’s friends advised Wilde to flee to France. He refused, preferring England’s bad weather and worse food. The first trial was a mistrial. In the second, Oscar was found guilty of “gross indecency” and sent to Pentonville Prison to spend a couple of years making big rocks into little rocks (actually it was mostly walking a “penal treadmill” used to power a mill for grinding corn or pumping water). He served his time, which wore on his fragile health, then fled to the mainland the day of his release. He died in France three years later at the age of forty-six.
Seems pretty fucked up, right? The criminalization and persecution of homosexuality has long been a blight upon our history, and there are still nations where it carries a penalty of death. England wouldn’t decriminalize it until 1967; the country’s prosecution for homosexuality and subsequent chemical castration of Alan Turing, a war hero whose decryption of German codes during the Second World War played a critical role in the Allied victory, led to Turing’s suicide in 1954.
There is more to the Oscar Wilde story. The truth is rarely pure.
Wilde was known for saying “I can resist everything except temptation.” Lord Alfred, who would later marry, procreate, and convert to Roman Catholicism to pray away the gay, introduced Oscar to the underground world of gay prostitution, who could not resist. Wilde solicited a series of impoverished boys as young as sixteen. He lavished them with expensive dinners, gifts, and cash. Some of the boys worked as prostitutes, others were just poor and desperate. After fleeing England, Wilde was known to have sexual relations with a fifteen-year-old in Italy named Giuseppe.
In the modern legal system, Oscar could face more prison time now than in 1895. Not for Giuseppe—the current age of consent in Italy is fourteen—but hiring a prostitute in present-day England aged sixteen or seventeen, regardless of gender, is punishable by up to seven years’ incarceration. Under current morals of fucking we’d proclaim Wilde was prosecuted for the wrong fucking thing.
With this additional knowledge, Wilde appears both victim and villain. How do we judge such villainy through a modern lens? Legality isn’t it, because lots of horrible things have been legal, such as, uh, slavery! Add to this that in a number of U.S. states it remained legal for a man to rape his wife until 1993. The Canadian government was stealing Indigenous children from their families and putting them in Residential Schools to “kill the Indian in the child” until 1996. Oh, and right now an octogenarian might be rubbing slippery bits with a fourteen-year old and the Italian government would say that’s just peachy.
The Oscar Wilde example manages to include all six of the chronic failures in one story. The “heir and a spare” aspect alludes to oppression of women as breeding stock. Hatred of homosexuality falls under #s 2 and 3, being motivated by both religion and bigotry. Greed, for both wealth and power, rears its head three times in the tale; aristocrats had the privilege of being quietly gay while lower classes did not, and Queensbury was vexed over Wilde’s interference in the perpetuation of his family dynasty. Additionally, Wilde saw no issue with using his wealth to purchase the bodies of boys in desperate circumstances. The indisputable facts of homosexuality as natural and prevalent among all human societies for the entirety of our history, as well as among many other species, were ignored to cover #5. And as an example of #6, Londoners didn’t care about the future of a talented playwright who might have made many more artistic contributions to the world had his life not been cut short. English society was too myopic to imagine that tolerance and inclusivity could be a boon rather than bane.
What’s fucked up? What qualifies as chronic failure? It’s complicated.
There Are No Universal Laws of Humanity
If you jump out of an airplane without a parachute, you’re going to have a bad day. As Sir Isaac Newton explained in 1687, there is a universal attraction between bodies. In this case, yours, and Earth’s. And Newton’s second law of motion further described how mass X acceleration = hitting some farmer’s field with enough force to turn your fragile being into a grease spot on the ground. Speaking of jumping from aircraft coupled with changeable moral codes, despite their planes being as flammable as newspaper soaked in napalm, Allied commanders in World War I didn’t permit pilots to wear parachutes because they believed such devices promoted cowardice. Here’s a conversation that might have happened:
World War I Allied Pilot: “I’ve heard of these cool new things called parachutes. Can I have one?”
Commander: “No.”
Pilot: “Why not?”
Commander: “Because we think you’re a chicken shit who will jump at the first sign of a German plane.”
Pilot: “The fuck?”
Commander: “Get in the goddamn plane.”
As a representation of chronic failures, the story involves bigotry against lower classes by their aristocrat-class officers, viewing them as inherently cowardly peasants. The belief also went against the fact that such pilots proved their courage in battle repeatedly. Moreover, it failed to consider the future by imagining that a pilot could parachute from a burning aircraft and live to fight another day.
By the time of the Second Big Killstravaganza against the Axis, commanders saw such thinking as wrong and said it was okay to jump out of a plane with a floaty thing attached to one’s back if the aircraft was indeed on fire. Tying back to what causes ground splatter, Newton came up with the law of universal gravitation and his laws of motion based on science, but history is not science.
There are no universal laws that can be ascribed to humanity. Homo sapiens are a multi-millennium N=1 experiment skewed by an endless array of cognitive biases. Will and Ariel Durant, who won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their historical works, explained, “Most history is guessing; the rest is prejudice.” And as a middle-class cis-hetero white guy, I am prejudiced up the posterior orifice. The two historians also proclaimed, “History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves.” At a proclamation of six chronic failures, perhaps it smirks.
History is full of deeds both noble and despicable. Along with slavery, there is self-sacrifice. Some were motivated by greed, others generosity. Many dedicated themselves to the art of killing, while some put their focus toward curing. There have been grave mistakes and greatness, confrontation and cooperation. Early in the twentieth century Spanish philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Yet history serves not just as warning, but encouragement. Humanity is not endless suck. We’ve done some inspiring shit.
In 2020, prior to the U.S. presidential election, there was a popular meme in the image of a bumper sticker spreading across social media that proclaimed, “Sweet Meteor of Death 2020.” It implied humanity is hopelessly evil and an asteroid should just do Earth a favor and snuff the semi-sentient meat sacks infesting every corner of it like a pernicious contagion. But we’re not all bad. These failures were not committed because people decided Let’s do evil. Rather, they were adaptive. We committed these sins again and again for what we believed were good reasons; there was a natural selection to them. Except “sin” doesn’t exist. It’s just a bullshit concept we made up. Newton’s laws are real, provable, repeatable science; laws that govern society are just some stuff we decided and had the ability to enforce. Although laws and morals and rules of behavior vary over areas and eras, all six of the chronic failures have consistently had the force of human law behind them. What we think is and is not evil is in a constant state of flux. It depends on what you can get enough people to buy in to.
Here Is An Idea
Fear created the first gods.
The skies opened in a terrible storm; lightning flashed, and thunder crashed. “What the shit was that?” someone exclaimed.
“The flashy-crashy gods are angered by our lack of babies. You must have sex with me to appease them.”
“. . .”
“For realz. Get naked or the sky spirits will strike you down.”
Someone bought that. The lies we tell and believe are what make society. Shared fiction is the root of all civilization, and we began with the supernatural because we didn’t know the square root of fuck all about how things work. Our evolutionarily programmed propensity for being scared shitless made us seek answers about the hidden forces in the earth and sky, and “God did it” was always popular reasoning. Actually, it was “gods” first. Monotheism came later. The better the story, the more people bought into it. The more who accepted the fiction, the greater a source of power it became.
Fear created rituals: prayers, songs, offerings, and sacrifices. Then the preachers began to create a system around these beliefs, a set of moral codes. These codes formed the basis of laws. The laws supported hierarchies. The substance of such codes varied wildly across civilizations. Some said, “Bacon is fantastic!” and others were all “Eating bacon is forbidden!” Certain cultures were easy going about sex, and others overly uptight about who was permitted to slide what appendage into which orifice. Humanity’s moral and legal codes may differ, but the existence of these codes is universal. All human societies create them. We create them. They are stories we made up that people chose to believe; a communal lie. We use them to compel, to control, so that we may form orderly societies that are secure and can grow. The ones that are most successful often conquer others, because life is competition.
The stories that dictate our behavior don’t have to make sense. They often contain contradictions and aren’t necessarily beneficial to the mass of society. Consider the rationalization for the nuclear arms race; sinking countless billions into a project designed to obliterate all life on Earth seems illogical no matter how you spin it.
Humans are often dumber than a box of otter snot. Muddling through, coming up with stupid ass shit to form a society that screws over the majority to the benefit of a minority. All because that minority was able to profit from the telling of a convincing lie. Why are humans so susceptible to such fictions, and permit ourselves to be ruled by them? The answer is simple: myth is a bonding force. Shared stories allow us to work together in numbers far beyond what other hominids can accomplish. A troop of chimpanzees loses its cohesion once it reaches about 150 members. Humans built empires containing millions of subjects because enough people believed the hierarchical structure and mythology the empire imposed. There wasn’t a genetic instinct for such mass cooperation, it was communal fictions creating potent social links that bound civilizations together across land and ocean alike.
What kind of fictions? Beyond the obvious one about gods, consider how you obtained this book. If you didn’t torrent the damn thing from the dark web, you used money to purchase it, and money is some serious bullshit. We just made it up. If there is an apocalypse, you might as well wipe your ass with that paper in your wallet. The numbers in your bank account will be as real as the Easter Bunny, because the lies supporting your hoarded wealth will evaporate in the harsh reality of how much food, guns, ammo, and medicine you stashed in a bunker for when the zombies come for that tasty brain of yours.
The lie that is money has proven the greatest bonding force and weapon of conquest in human history; we will discuss it in detail in Chapter 4 about our propensity for greed. Money, as much as I enjoy having it, is a critical fiction that impelled large groups to work together and subjugate peoples and planet. Spiritual coin can be spent as well. Religion, for all its ills, has shown itself to be a pervasive part of societal function. Supernatural comforts have often been more valued than natural aids to those facing massive inequality and rampant despair. To the lowest members of society God has given their lives meaning and even dignity because of their perceived solemn relationship with a higher power.
Napoleon Bonaparte referred to religion as “excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.” He said it’s what prevents poor from murdering rich, an idea he took from famed author and philosopher of the French Enlightenment Voltaire, who wrote, “There is no god, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night.” In a clear example of chronic failure #2, putting too much faith in God, I remember a quirky old British history professor during my undergraduate days telling the class how the typical medieval peasant was far more concerned about getting into heaven than where their next meal was coming from.
None of this is fair.
We are not created equal. There are natural, biological inequalities among all creatures, and the struggle to survive is one of competition. Nature doesn’t care about the individual, only the species. Some are just better equipped for survival based on the luck of their genetic code. Inequality is not just inborn but has a tendency to exacerbate with the increasing complexity of a civilization. It was these genetic differences that first contributed to social inequalities. This isn’t perpetuating some “scientific racism” bullshit. That’s getting ripped apart in Chapter 3 about embracing bigotry. Certain things were naturally selected early in humanity’s crawling out of the muck, including not just strength and speed, but creativity and intelligence. Fortuitous genetics coupled with a lot of random chance promoted the stratification of sapiens into rulers and ruled early on, and every new discovery or useful tool or invention was seized by those with the ability to do so to further elevate one group and subjugate another.
A good story is a powerful tool of subjugation. One hyper-muscled maniac with a penchant for killing wouldn’t rule the tribe for long if a prehistoric Poindexter convinced enough of his fellow troglodytes their leader had ghosts in his blood and the only way to appease the spirits was by spilling Gorak’s guts on the ground. Such competitions were all too common, because survival was at stake. It bred pugnacity and pride, acquisitiveness and alliance-making. History is the battle of minorities watched by majorities awaiting a victor to lead them; the innovative are followed by those who imitate, providing the labor to create a civilization.
To be powerful, to mold societal behavior, stories need to meet certain criteria. Simplicity is a must, because that makes it possible to get the masses to understand it. It can’t be easy to disprove either. Gorak has ghosts in his blood, but they’re invisible and speak only to me. Prove me wrong. It also must be told as an absolute truth. Muhammed didn’t conquer the Arabian peninsula because he had a vague idea of some new monotheism called Islam. He spoke with certainty as the unequivocal final prophet of God. The story must also have a contagious, evangelical quality to it; sometimes that evangelizing involved conquerors gesturing toward sharp implements of death that awaited reluctant converts. After centuries of subjugation by the Roman Empire, Christianity came to eventually rule it because so many accepted the story. Religion and politics have often worked well together. With the preachers saying such and such leader is chosen by God, that leader in turn shared the wealth extracted from the peasants with the clergy in exchange for their support. The story also needs to hold people accountable and incentivize certain behaviors. Loyalty and conformity are valued and rewarded; disobedience to the morals and laws are shamed and punished. The system becomes ingrained in the culture and takes on a life of its own. Again, it’s all bullshit. It’s just stuff we made up that caught on and proved resilient to what the environment threw at it. For a time, at least. The myths evolve. Usually gradually, but sometimes via a rapid revolution.
It’s not just religious stories that are powerful bonding forces. It worked for Nazism, communism, and liberalism. In the thirteenth century the Magna Carta put forth the idea that kings were not in fact permitted to do whatever dafuq they pleased, but could be subject to the law. Five centuries later a group of American slaveowners took it a step further by writing a Declaration of Independence proclaiming certain “unalienable Rights,” but only for white dudes. Unalienable Rights? The fuck are those? Objectively speaking, there are no such things. Evolution has no point, no purpose. Natural selection is a process. People are not biologically equal. The tall person can pluck fruit from higher up in the tree than the short one can. Neither has a “right” to that fruit, it’s just about physical ability. If you want to discuss rights, you must invent a set of rules and get lots of buy-in. If the tribe is mostly short folks, they can coerce or cajole the tall ones into sharing that fruit. They can make it law that tall people are fruit pickers who must give it to the short people. It’s not a physical law of the universe like the ones Newton described, rather just another human fiction.
The earliest orders may have been determined via a battle of titans, both physical and intellectual, winning followers to their sides, but such biological meritocracies turned to feces in short order. Once the hierarchy was in place, inheritance became important, because I don’t want some other dude’s crotch goblin getting the benefits of my hard work. Hereditary titles are a shit system of governance; before long we had brainless fuckpuddles running kingdoms into the ground while ruling over potential Curies and deGrasse Tysons and Einsteins who were forced to toil each day at mindless tasks, told it was their lot in life.
The systems created by myths work because they have true believers, adherents ready to spread the gospel and enforce the rules. But even though these methods of cooperation are often oppressive and exploitative, they persist. One thing that helped them survive was that even those lower in the pecking order, compared to their ancestors, often benefited from the new establishment. Empires brought stability, communal languages, and the sharing and spreading of useful ideas and technologies. In a prior age a region could be full of small tribes that often warred with one another, but a conqueror brought them all together as one. It sucked for the conquered, but generations later most of those who survived it were better off, even though the process of creating the empire was often unnecessarily cruel, even genocidal.
All societies across time discriminate in some way. Some are worse than others, but classification of peoples into rulers and ruled, with levels in between, based purely on imaginary reasoning, seems critical to a functioning human civilization. And once in place, the system reinforces itself because those on top have access to the resources to keep themselves there, and those on the bottom are kept hungry and ignorant with no path to rising to a superior level in the hierarchy. For much of history many didn’t even consider attempting to change their station. The story they were told was that God put them there and they better suck it up or face eternal hellfire or some shit. A lot of effort goes into reinforcing the hierarchy, via both myth repetition and brute force, because those on top have much to lose.
Why Are We Such Assholes?
There is no objective basis for defining what does and does not make for an asshole. No one who is a dick believes they’re a dick. They feel justified.
For a couple hundred years in Europe there was this horrifyingly anti-Semitic thing called “The Jewish Question.” It was a debate regarding what should be done regarding the status and treatment of Jewish people. The idea of considering them human beings with equal rights wasn’t given much thought. In Nazi Germany, the belief that Jews posed a problem for the state prompted them to develop a “Final Solution” to this question. Today, we call it the Holocaust.
The Nazis didn’t think they were the bad guys.
Prior to World War II there were fewer than seventeen million Jewish people on Earth. By the time Hitler blew his murderous brains out in the spring of 1945 while hiding in a Berlin bunker, more than a third of all Jews in the world were dead. Over three-quarters of a century later, the world Jewish population has not reached pre-war levels. The fucking Nazis machine-gunned entire villages in front of trenches, creating mass graves. These bastards bayoneted babies. They built gas chambers and furnaces to improve the efficiency of their mass murder. Most believed they were doing good the way a surgeon feels about cutting away a cancer. Their warped way of thinking saw Jews as a toxic influence on society; it instilled in them the idea that genocide was the answer to the problem standing in their way of creating a genetically and morally superior utopia. They were way wrong, but they didn’t imagine they were wrong. Neither did the Japanese, who used every diabolical method imaginable, including chemical and biological warfare, to exterminate twenty million Chinese during World War II. There was also lots of raping and medical experiments, yet Japan remains parsimonious in the offering of apologies for such atrocities.
What the fuck were they thinking?
That’s a question that motivated English philosopher of history R.G. Collingwood. Witnessing the carnage of both WWI and part of WWII (he died in 1943), Collingwood was dedicated to moving beyond what he referred to as “scissors and paste” history, which he described as a repetition of what happened rather than a probing insight into the minds of the actors. “All history is the history of thought,” he proclaimed in his posthumously published The Idea of History. We must perceive the motivations of the participants of history to truly understand it, examine why we kept committing these same failures, why they were considered by the players of the time as good deeds and not evil, and why things changed. It’s not all doom and gloom. Substantial progress has been made, and it’s important to fathom the motivations for that as well. To comprehend how people can commit acts we consider evil and not see them as such we must go back a long way, because much of what we consider to be modern vice was once virtue.
Humanity is a serial killer.
We are Homo sapiens. “Homo” is derived from Latin meaning “human.” It is a genus of which we are the only ones remaining. There used to be several varieties of humans such as Homo erectus, antecessor, ergaster, floresiensis, habilis, heidelbergensis, neanderthalensis . . . Concerning that last one, unless you can trace all your genetic line to the African continent, you probably have a couple percentage points of Neanderthal DNA in you. Other than that, the rest are fossils in the soil.
They differed from us in myriad ways, but they were all technically human beings. And we killed a lot of them. There were at least six species of humans on Earth at the same time, but now it’s just us. There was some interbreeding, but also pushing other members of the Homo genus to extinction via methods that likely included genocide so that all that remains are sapiens. That’s also Latin, meaning “wise,” which is debatable. Perhaps we should have been called Homo internicivus, the murderous humans.
Historian Yuval Harari described in his book Sapiens that we used our superior cognitive capabilities to leap from the middle of the food chain right to the top in, from a natural selection perspective, a startlingly brief period. He explained that lack of time to evolve into this role made Homo sapiens “like a banana republic dictator.” So recently having been an underdog in fear of other predators we are anxious over our new position, “which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.”
Another important thing to consider regarding our species is that we’re some fragile motherfuckers. Prior to the twentieth century, you had a twenty-five per cent chance of dying before your first birthday, and a whopping fifty per cent chance of not living to see fifteen. Doesn’t matter where on Earth you came from, who your parents were, how rich or poor you were. Overall, the averages stand until just over a century ago. Once born, you were just as likely to have a sweet sixteen as not.
Untimely death was ever-present in history. You know that guy whose name appears on your milk, even that almond bullshit? He wasn’t just known for pasteurization. Louis also created the first attenuated vaccine in 1885. Part of his motivation to cure and prevent disease likely came from having lost three of his five children to typhoid. This was not unusual. Women’s lives were at risk every time they popped out another baby, but it’s not like men gave them a choice. Humanity needed to birth an average of six squalling poop factories per couple, with men only involved in the fun part, to make sure three of them survived to adulthood so the population would grow. This was before epidurals.
We either died young, expected to die young, or ones we loved died young. Life was constant fear and bereavement; that shit messes you up. It made us impetuous, impulsive, selfish. Early death is a barrier to development of wisdom and understanding. John Keats, a surgeon and English Romantic poet, died of tuberculosis at twenty-five. Author Emily Brontë was taken by the same disease at thirty. The monk Swami Vivekananda didn’t make it to forty. Mozart was gone at thirty-five. Matoaka (Pocahontas) died at about twenty. Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was gone at thirty-two. Lungtok Gyatso, the ninth Dalai Lama, died aged only nine. King Tutankhamun croaked of malaria at nineteen. Alexander the Great began his dirt nap at thirty-two. And on and on.
Life is competition. Humanity has struggled both socially and technologically to reach the point where I can be a healthy fifty-something married to a respected female physician with both our children having survived to adulthood. None of us have ever known a day of real hunger or battled a serious illness. Had we lived only two centuries previous, my wife would not have had the opportunity to become a doctor, and it’s a certainty she and our son would both have died during his difficult birth. Instead, modern medicine had us safely home a mere fifteen hours later.
It was massive cooperative efforts that brought about the medical and technological advancements keeping death at bay. We learned to cooperate with each other via our shared stories, but such cooperation was a tool of competition, both against our environments and other peoples. Our DNA remembers this struggle to survive; it burns in our blood. The hunger, the fear, the need to kill or flee. We are programmed to feast to near bursting out of concern over the scarcity of the next meal. Many yearn to fornicate anything that moves because nature desires quantity in order to select for quality. Most of us faced a host of insecurities in this struggle for survival across the eons so that it transformed us into hoarders, breeding avarice into our genetic code. Chronic failure #4, getting too greedy, is a survival trait of our species run amok, creating rampant wealth inequality. Who needs two billion dollars? Apparently, someone with a mere one billion. More than enough seems never enough.
Why Do We Fight?
Imagine three different ancient tribes. One is full of ruthless killers. They’re so ruthless, they can’t get along with anyone, including themselves. Fuck cooperation, I’ll kill you! It’s not evolutionarily adaptive. Scratch that tribe. Another is all hippie peace and love, whether you’re in the tribe or not. The third is peace and love within their own tribe, but otherwise xenophobic as hell. If you’re not part of their group, they’ll ghost your ass.
Which one survives?
Which one conquers, spreads, sprays their DNA all over creation? Us. We do. Chronic failure #3, the embracing of bigotry, was naturally selected for via evolution. That’s what millennia of history has produced: Mean motherfuckers ready to kill the outsider, with the spoils of continued existence going to the victor. There was no United Nations, no Hague, no international court saying we couldn’t do these things. We did what we had to, and it was “right” because the alternative was oblivion.
Yet we have proven that we can change. Recall the parachute example from WWI? I mentioned how thinking evolved by the time of WWII; commanders learned their pilots were not in fact cowards who would leap from a perfectly good aircraft at the first sign of the enemy, and that having a parachute also imparted a tactical military advantage. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, parachutes were an important contributor to the British victory. Any Germans who were shot down and successfully parachuted to the ground sat out the rest of the war in a prison camp. Defenders got back into the fight. Instead of splattering into a field and the farmer fetching a shovel, he’d say to the RAF fighter pilot landing among the barley, “Oi! Nigel! Gerry gotchu, eh?”
“‘Fraid so, old chum. Took an ‘einkel[*] down first.”
“Bloody good show. Time fer a spot o’ tea then?”
“Thanks, luv. Best be back to me base. King and country, you know. Fancy me a lift?”
“Right-o. ‘Op in then.” The farmer would drive the pilot back to his base; he’d climb into another Spitfire and go shoot down more Germans. The story about parachutes evolved because the environment, which included attaining new information, shifted. Another story that helped change minds and laws was a literal work of fiction, based on reality, that put a powerful idea into people’s heads that millions were willing to fight and even die for.
[*] An “einkel” refers to the Heinkel HE 111 strategic bomber aircraft used by the German Luftwaffe in the attack on England during the Battle of Britain.
You know those festering fucknuckles on social media who seek to silence people by proclaiming internet activism doesn’t do shit? Tell them the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Back when the internet was printed on trees, it began as a forty-week serial in the abolitionist publication The National Era in 1851; it’s a story of a white farmer’s decision to sell two of his Black slaves to pay his debts. One slave is a middle-aged man named Uncle Tom who has both a wife and children. The other is Harry, the only surviving child of the farmer’s maid, Eliza. It’s a tale of families being ripped apart, sold like a consumer good because a farmer needed the money, and the heartache that ensued. Telling that story changed history. But why? How?
Might often makes “right.” As I’ve explained, ideas can generate a mighty following. Such was the case with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book. The series was so popular the Era got complaints if the next installment hadn’t appeared in the latest issue. It was published as a novel in 1852 and sold 300,000 copies its first year in the U.S., and 200,000 in the UK. Selling that many copies of a book in 1852 qualifies as “a metric shit-ton.”
Stowe, a white woman, had something of a Christian savior complex and failed to present Black people as humans worthy of the same rights as their white counterparts in her book. But she did get an important message across: Chattel slavery is wrong. Of course, the pro-slavery shitnuggets blew their poop so hard their outhouses overflowed. They called the book fake news. The next year Stowe was all, “References, motherfuckers,” with the publication of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a nonfiction book citing numerous “real-life equivalents” to the novel. It too became a bestseller.
The stories reached people. It made them rethink the plot of their own lives, the society they were a part of, giving rocket fuel to the abolitionist movement. It was so influential, in 1862, a year into the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln met with the author and is believed to have said, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.” A century later another war prompted a Black man to take a stand against injustice; the story of Muhammad Ali’s refusal to “go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people,” despite the devastating effect on his boxing career, was an emotionally moving tale that helped turn public opinion against the war in Vietnam.
This reveals that the stories we hold dear as a society can change rapidly. We may have killer caveman DNA coursing through our veins, but we also have the most superior brains on the planet by a wide margin. We are malleable. Flexibility and adaptability to changing environments and realities is a core strength of our species; it’s why we rule the damn planet. Our complex neural processing units can imagine a wide variety of amazing things to do and be and provide the drive to realize such dreams.
We believed we could fly, then we did. All the way to the moon.
Humans may not have any natural, inborn rights at all, but we can imagine we do, and make those rights a reality for all. We can use our mighty minds to choose peace over war, science over superstition, cooperation over coercion, equality over oppression.
We are free to curtail our freedoms for the good of others. Wait, what?
Libertarians. These invertebrates make me want to start swearing like a mom with a red-wine hangover walking barefoot through a LEGO-filled living room. Libertarians are all about “Muh freedumb!” It’s difficult to trust that people will use their freedom wisely when I am currently witnessing millions go nuclear over being asked to wear a piece of cloth in front of their stupid face to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic. I have little faith in a political belief that, in the United States, is 96% white people and more than two-thirds male. Libertarianism is astrology for white men.
Let’s quote famed historians Will and Ariel Durant again: “freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.” You-fucking-what-when? Yeah, true story. If you’re equal to me, it means I lack the freedom to kill you or make you my slave. Throughout history, the strong ruled the weak because there were no laws infringing upon their freedom to do so. This goes beyond individuals. In addition to having a master’s degree in history, I also have an MBA; believe when I say if you permit capitalism to run amok, it sure as shit will. The goal of publicly traded companies is to maximize shareholder value, and to do this they must be competitive. If one company is allowed to dump all their toxic waste into the river (infringing on my access to clean water), they will save money because it’s way less expensive than dealing with that waste in an environmentally friendly manner. They can put those savings toward research and development, expansion, sales and marketing etc. that provide the company a competitive edge. The “nice” company that decides not to dump their sludge in the river goes out of business, and pretty soon the only surviving companies are the polluters. That’s why we need strong environmental protection laws.
Would you be okay with cigarette companies having the freedom to falsely advertise that their product is good for children? Unrestrained capitalism would have Marlboros included in a McDonald’s Happy Meal to get them addicted young. Historically, companies were often permitted to engage in the most egregious business strategies, and it molded the world we live in. One example is that of the British East India Company. In Chapter 4, about getting too greedy, we’ll examine how companies such as this were responsible for conquest and genocide, but a specific example of capitalism run amok was how the company took large quantities of opium from its territories in India then sold it to the Chinese. It was all totally legit because they had a royal charter from the British crown.
In 1839, troubled by both the mind-fucking of their populace and the outflow of silver, the Chinese seized 3,000 tons of opium in the port city of Canton (now Guangzhou) and blockaded all foreign ships from entering. The British East India Company went all Bugs Bunny: “Of course you realize this means war.”
And war it was. From 1840-42 the British won a series of conclusive battles against the Chinese, resulting in the Treaty of Nanking going into effect in 1843. It was the first of what the Chinese would come to call “the unequal treaties.” The terms of the treaty were “We’re gonna import enough opium to fuck up half a continent and you’re gonna buy it.” The British also got an assload of financial reparations for the opium confiscated in 1839, and, most important, they got Hong Kong. Hong Kong Island was made a crown colony, ceded to Queen Victoria “in perpetuity” to provide British traders their own harbor for their opium-laden ships.
See how curtailing certain freedoms is a good idea for the betterment of society as a whole? Absolute freedom leads to outrageous oppression and chaos, whereas absolute equality is stifling beyond all reason; a balance must be struck. Oh, and next time there is a pandemic and contagious disease experts tells you to wear a mask, wear a fucking mask.
A Collection of Crimes
Voltaire wrote that history is “a collection of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Sometimes, it takes us a while to realize something is a good idea even though it was staring us in the face all along. Like, we’ve had both wheels and luggage forever, but no one thought to merge the two until 1970. Other times, shit happens by accident. The Crusades weren’t just about religion; Europeans wanted to capture trade routes to the east because money and colonialism. Colonialism isn’t about literal colons, although it does involve assholes, such as Christopher Columbus, who was a massive rectum. He went the wrong goddamn way, accidentally bumping into a totally unknown hemisphere because of Christians getting their asses kicked by Muslims over a route to Asia. And so, Europeans found a new land to usurp, a new people to exploit and annihilate. Well, until 1497 when Portuguese sailor Vasco da Gama found that route to Asia around the southern tip of Africa so they could start screwing over India and her neighbors as well as the Americas.
All the while we found ways to justify the atrocities. An example is the vicious circle of how racial hierarchies persist in modern America despite there being an official end to slavery in 1865. The slavers felt the need to believe in their own piety, and therefore created both religious and scientific myths to justify oppression. These myths persisted long after abolition, resulting in discriminatory laws, poverty, lack of access to education, and cultural prejudices. If allowed to, discrimination gets worse over time, not better. Money goes to those who already have it, and poverty begets poverty. The victims of history stay victims, and the privileged continue to reap privilege.
Humans are notoriously good at justifying bad behaviors that serve us. Conquerors often saw themselves as being on “civilizing missions” they felt morally obliged to undertake. In 1899, The Jungle Book author Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem titled “The White Man’s Burden” where he described the Caucasian responsibility to “serve your captives’ need” because these “sullen peoples” are “Half devil and half child.”
Change has come slow, which is unfortunately necessary. Radical ideas that shift society in a kinder, more equal direction require a vetting process. Not all the roots that form our societies are bad, and new stories must run a gauntlet of opposition to ensure they won’t lead us to catastrophe, because many of them are crap ideas. The 1985 Live Aid concert that saw the biggest music acts of the day raise $200 million for famine relief in Africa seemed like a great idea, but organizer Bob Geldof ignored warnings from relief agencies about entering into a partnership with Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam, who caused the fucking famine in the first place. Mengistu, a ruthless dictator involved in a civil war, used hunger as a weapon to starve the insurgents into submission. But Geldof refused to listen, allying himself with the dictator and providing funds for his ongoing butchery. Mengistu had been deadlocked in the war, but the influx of cash allowed him to continue his brutal reign and finance his resettlement campaign that killed a hundred thousand people and displaced many more. This reality didn’t stop Geldof from bathing in adulation for his magnificent humanitarian white savior clusterfuck. I know Queen rocked that concert but, come on.
Tradition is more than just peer pressure from dead people. Caution is evolutionarily adaptive, which is why so many members of society lean conservative and resist change. Opposition to good ideas serves an additional purpose: by trying to expose and destroy good ideas, the truly exceptional ones consistently prove resilient, eventually becoming adopted because of the tensile strength of the idea being revealed via withstanding a barrage of criticism. Canada adopted universal healthcare only after a lengthy battle; it didn’t happen overnight because some curmudgeon who styles his hair with a balloon waved a magic wand. Sometimes, a single image tells a story that refuses to die despite vehement opposition. In 1970, the National Guard opened fire on Kent State University students protesting the Vietnam War. Four were killed, and a photograph of young Mary Ann Vecchio crying over the body of slain student Jeffrey Miller was seen on the cover of newspapers across the globe, winning the Pulitzer Prize for the photographer. In the aftermath, Vecchio returned home to Florida and was ostracized at school and sent enough hate mail to make a YouTube comment section gasp; the governor of Florida said she was part of a communist conspiracy. Despite the vitriol, half a century later the picture serves as a galvanizing statement about resistance to police and military oppression.
Such tenacity of good ideas is why, even though humanity often behaves as maniacal as a toddler fed a diet of Monster Energy drinks and raised by Chernobyl wolves, there are glimmers of progress. There are myriad examples and explanations for this progress, which I’ll investigate individually for each of the six chronic failures. Speaking of which, let’s summarize them each prior to doing the deep dive.
1. We kept women down
But! But! [example] was a matriarchy!
Was it? Was it really? The existence of actual matriarchies is almost unheard of in history, because such a thing would be a reversal of patriarchy. In other words, women treating men the same shitty way we’ve treated them, and that almost never happens. Equality is not matriarchy. Reverence of women is not matriarchy. A woman as ruler is not matriarchy. Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, Wu Zetian, and Elizabeth I may stand out as powerful female leaders, but they were permitted to have their positions by cabals of powerful men who had something to gain by their presence on their respective thrones. And once a woman had outlived their usefulness to such men, such as the case with Joan of Arc, they didn’t cry much if someone decided to, you know, tie them atop and pile of wood and set it on fire.
Chapter 1 examines the roots of patriarchal culture and how and why men forced women into being a breeding class of humans across numerous cultures and ages. It will explain how many women were coopted into supporting this gender inequality, and the devastating opportunity cost relegating women to subservient roles in society has had on the development of human civilizations. As someone married to a brilliant physician who graduated at the top of her class from medical school, I cannot help but lament the eons of wasted genius. This section will also examine how gender equality has progressed and what environmental shifts helped promote such progress.
2. We put too much faith in God
There is ample evidence that some religion is good and has served as a binding force that has actually helped to create peace, despite all the wars it also started, by giving societies shared myths and values to bind them together. Religion has the power to turn hundreds of small, constantly warring tribes into a single large tribe that is less likely to fight amongst itself because of their communal beliefs. Then Prophet Muhammad dies and his son-in-law and father-in-law squabble over the Muslim leadership and things go to shit again. Or, on Halloween of 1517 Martin Luther says, “Treat or treat, motherfuckers!” and nails a list to the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg detailing ninety-five reasons the Catholic Church can fuck all the way off. This launches numerous wars causing millions of deaths.
Humanity trends toward unity, which is a good thing because once unified we fight less and compare notes and work together for both societal and technological advancement. Ironically, religion helped create the unity that promoted scientific knowledge that disproved a multitude of religious beliefs.
Chapter 2 examines how the first gods began and how belief is encoded into our genes. It will cover the important trend toward a form of monotheism that spread across the globe, binding humanity together, and how while serving humanity it also fucked us in every hole so that today, despite ample progress in loosening religion’s iron grip on various cultures, we still have people exploding themselves in crowded markets and resisting science and saying women aren’t allowed sovereignty over their own bodies.
3. We embraced bigotry
Bigotry makes slavery and war so much easier. It also serves as a scapegoat for leaders to control their own people. As author Robert Heinlein explained, “You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.”
Chapter 3 examines the biological and cultural roots of bigotry, how xenophobia has both served and harmed humankind, and what has allowed for the painfully slow progress made in creating a world that is less racist (but still really racist). The aspect of a “common enemy” may have proved naturally selected for by making stronger communities that are willing to fight to protect themselves and expand their territory, but it also became culturally ingrained so that peace remains ever elusive. We continue to invent fictions to justify the oppression of almost any group, which has had far-reaching consequences.
4. We got too greedy
For most of human history the majority subsisted on the edge of starvation; it bred acquisitiveness via creation of a hoarding instinct. We always wanted something tucked away for the next famine. Chapter 4 examines the biological roots of our hoarding instinct, how it contributed to capitalism run amok, and why this has proven both boon and bane for society.
Gordon Gecko was partially right, in that the desire for more has prompted much of human advancement. This isn’t solely about money, but also power. Alas, from robber barons to gerrymandering, it’s often the mean motherfuckers who lead, because they don’t feel bound by rules or decency. Wealth inevitably concentrates toward a center; a center that is willing to lie, cheat, steal, and murder to acquire and acquire. It goes further. There are those who want to be led, and those willing to be led astray, reinforcing the power dynamics that let the ruthless rule. People are often ready to sell out their neighbor for a crumb, and this has been exploited across the ages.
5. We fought against facts
A mere four centuries ago saying that Earth was not the center of the universe could get you in deep poo, or at least sentenced to spending the rest of your life under house arrest, as was the case with Galileo. That’s because the Catholic Church was supposed to have all the answers any human could ever need, and they were loath to relinquish such power over the populace by permitting science types to ask and answer difficult questions about the nature of reality.
In Chapter 5 we examine how our biologically-ingrained cautiousness fought against our dopamine-driven desire to explore, coupled with a battle between powerful entities that each had something to gain via the exploration and suppression of science. This created a world where there are those who believe God is all the protection they need from disease and that Bill Gates is installing tracking chips into vaccines for a virus he created in the first place. Being anti-vaccination is not a new thing; despite the first smallpox vaccine being created in 1796, a third of a billion peopledied in the twentieth century alone from that disease partially because vaccination was met with so much ignorant resistance.
6. We didn’t worry about the future
When Greta Thunberg was fifteen, she was supposed to be in school learning to become a good little consumer of planetary resources. Instead, she was protesting the lack of action on climate change outside the Swedish parliament. And hordes of mediocre white men from o’er the land collectively misplaced their excrement and unleashed the ALL CAPS fury, screeching like a bunch of howler monkeys on a meth bender. Why such vitriol? Because fuck the planet and people of tomorrow. I need to make money today.
Capitalism, for all the benefits it provided to society, has been consistently and painfully short-sighted. Long before money was a thing biology programmed us to worry about today and tomorrow far more than about next year. In Chapter 6 we learn how biology and greed merged to create a situation where millions fight against blatantly obvious threats to the continued existence of our species in order to squeeze another percentage point of profit onto this year’s income statement. It’s like a planetary-wide Stanford marshmallow experiment, where in 1972 researchers studied delayed gratification in children to determine who would eat a mediocre reward now vs. who had the patience to wait and get a better reward later. Humanity is a bunch of kids gobbling down the marshmallow while the instructions are still being read.
As revealed in the Oscar Wilde example, there is much overlap between the six chronic failures; interconnection makes them reinforce each other, makes them tenacious. More generally, here is an example of how one of the six—going overboard on God—served as an umbrella failure for the other five.
The major religions diminished the role of women so as to not threaten the male-dominated leadership (#1). Also, they promoted bigotry because it gives an “other” for them to strengthen their hold over adherents (#3). When you can blame the people of a different color who speak a different language and even have a different god, followers are less likely to look to their leaders as the source of their woes but will focus their ire in the direction of where their leaders point. This of course ties in with greed and the quest for power, because religions are reluctant to lose either and will utilize whatever methods to retain them (#4). They will also fight against facts because science is often anathema to religion (#5). And who cares about preserving the planet or even worrying overmuch about the long-term thriving of humanity when eternal salvation awaits (#6)? Regardless of how destructive these behaviors proved we had our reasons for consistently embracing such historic failures across the eons. We often saw them as right, necessary, and just. There was short-term gain that generated a stimulus-response style reinforcement that humanity has constantly had to fight to make meagre societal advancements against continuous foolhardiness.
All history is the history of thought. By understanding the thinking that has gone into repeating these mistakes, we can progress toward making them less often, and perhaps surviving and even thriving as a species that is worthy of the name Homo sapiens.
Perhaps one day we will become wise humans.
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