> [!NOTE] A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up > `Author:` Tom Phillips `Availability:` ## Summary The book is a darkly humorous and cynical tour of human history, arguing that our entire story is not one of glorious [[progress]], but a long, unbroken chain of monumental mistakes, poor planning, and catastrophic blunders. Core Thesis: From ancient civilizations to the modern day, humanity's greatest talent is its unparalleled ability to make things worse through arrogance, short-sightedness, and a consistent failure to learn from the past. Key Examples: Phillips uses historical events—like the destruction of the Rapa Nui ecosystem on Easter Island, various failed utopian societies, and disastrous military strategies—to illustrate that our species is fundamentally comical in its incompetence. The book suggests that our current global crises are just the latest chapter in this long tradition of "fucking it up." ## Key Takeaways ## Quotes - ## Notes Reading this, it makes me think about how much randomness there is in life, and also how idiocy is the main factor in evil.. How lack of knowledge, ignorance, and a belief in something, is possibly humans greatest flaw. > “Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.” Jim Butcher, [Vignette](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/4319010) This quote, ==highlighting stupidity as a greater threat than evil due to its commonality and destructive, unpredictable nature==, echoes ideas from thinkers like **[[Dietrich Bonhoeffer]]**, who saw stupidity as a worse societal ill than deliberate evil because it can be manipulated by power, making people defenseless tools for destruction, not just agents of their own harm. It's a sentiment often found in popular culture, such as Harry Dresden novels by Jim Butcher, and aligns with theories like Carlo Cipolla's, which argues stupid people cause losses to others without benefiting themselves, making them the most dangerous force.  **Key Ideas & Similar Concepts:** - **[Bonhoeffer's "Stupidity"](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Bonhoeffer%27s+%22Stupidity%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&mstk=AUtExfCPWIUXf1ue5GA0y3A82uznyjEp4ZFztvnm5HriS1B64L5S_3jr-X-UZTCpvnKnDGQFJvcTjSWCsDDzEL8nYmayrRkfuLMeY8tYj-0SlsuV2ty5EJPfo44Ikrup4pdyUkMFgzImy1XdB45NLvoL5KbEyNiOBw2Lz6U6WpJq5uF-nR9Tpz3JDGdvQs2Tvg3meyiI9mYNS-O2dCtEWsfpwyZK6MByw0VH_p-V6Zem5lFB-UrBkmlRVhroXFPul29YjxIcb1Xnao3A2L5zWK00bNxL&csui=3&ved=2ahUKEwjTgq3a3biRAxUqTEEAHd4_CPkQgK4QegQIBBAB)**: He argued that stupidity isn't a lack of intelligence but a _moral failing_ where people abdicate critical thinking, becoming susceptible to manipulation by those in power, making them tools for evil. - **[Cipolla's Five Laws of Stupidity](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Cipolla%27s+Five+Laws+of+Stupidity&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&mstk=AUtExfCPWIUXf1ue5GA0y3A82uznyjEp4ZFztvnm5HriS1B64L5S_3jr-X-UZTCpvnKnDGQFJvcTjSWCsDDzEL8nYmayrRkfuLMeY8tYj-0SlsuV2ty5EJPfo44Ikrup4pdyUkMFgzImy1XdB45NLvoL5KbEyNiOBw2Lz6U6WpJq5uF-nR9Tpz3JDGdvQs2Tvg3meyiI9mYNS-O2dCtEWsfpwyZK6MByw0VH_p-V6Zem5lFB-UrBkmlRVhroXFPul29YjxIcb1Xnao3A2L5zWK00bNxL&csui=3&ved=2ahUKEwjTgq3a3biRAxUqTEEAHd4_CPkQgK4QegQIBBAD)**: Italian economist Carlo Cipolla's humorous yet insightful laws identify stupid people as those who harm others while gaining nothing, and crucially, non-stupid people consistently underestimate their destructive potential. - **Unpredictability**: A key danger of stupidity is its unpredictability, contrasting with evil, which, while bad, often operates within understandable (if wicked) motives; stupidity acts without reason, causing unforeseen chaos. - **Power & Stupidity**: The combination of power with stupidity is especially dangerous, as individuals or groups lacking critical judgment but holding influence can enact widespread harm, notes [Centre for Male Psychology](https://www.centreformalepsychology.com/male-psychology-magazine-listings/an-epidemic-of-stupidity-and-its-danger-to-society-and-democracy) and Paula Reed Nancarrow's quote list.  In essence, the quote points to a widespread, mindless action (stupidity) as a more pervasive and less manageable threat than targeted malice (evil). > [!info] > ## Highlights Roughly 3.2 million years later, a different group of apes - some of them now in possession of PhDs - would dig up her fossilised bones. Because this was the 196os, and they were listening to a popular song by a group of extremely high Liverpudlians at the time, they decided to call her Lucy. She was a brand-new species - what we now call an Australopithecus afarensis - and she was hailed as the 'missing link between humans and apes. Lucy's discovery would captivate the world: she became a household name, her skeleton would be taken on a multi-year tour of the USA, and she's now the star attraction in the National Museum in Addis Ababa. In one of those ironies that the universe seems to really enjoy, the reasons we cock it up on such a vast scale are often the exact same things that set us apart from our fellow animals and allow us to achieve greatness. Humans see patterns in the world, we can communicate this to other humans, and we have the capacity to imagine futures that don't yet exist: how if we just changed this thing, then that thing would happen, and the world would be a slightly better place. The only trouble is … well, we're not terribly good at any of those things. Any honest assessment of humanity's previous performance on those fronts reads like a particularly brutal annual review from a boss who hates you. We imagine patterns where they don't exist. Our communication skills are, uh, sometimes lacking. And we have an extraordinarily poor track record of failing to realise that changing this thing will also lead to the other thing, and that even worse thing, and oh God no now this thing is happening how do we stop it. Within a few thousand years of modern humans moving into an area, the Neanderthals start to vanish from the fossil record, leaving behind only a few ghostly genes that still haunt our DNA. (There was clearly a bit of interbreeding between the Neanderthals and the interlopers who were replacing them; if you're of European or Asian descent, for example, there's a good chance that somewhere between 1 and 4 per cent of your [[DNA]] is Neanderthal in origin.) .. because of those mental shortcuts our brains use. Two of the main shortcuts are the 'anchoring heuristic' and the 'availability heuristic', and they both cause us no end of bother. Anchoring means that when you make up your mind about something, especially if you don't have much to go on, you're disproportionately influenced by the first piece of information you hear. More people were killed by lawnmowers than by terrorism in the USA in the decade between 2007 and 2017, but at the time of writing, the US government has yet to launch a War on Lawnmowers. Working together, the anchoring heuristic and the availability heuristic are both really useful for making snap judgements in moments of crisis, or making all those small, everyday decisions that don't have much impact. But if you want to make a more informed decision that takes into account all the complexity of the modern world, they can be a bit of a nightmare. Your brain will keep trying to slide back to its evidential [[Comfort]] zone of whatever you heard first, or whatever comes to mind most quickly. Before I began researching this book, I thought that confirmation bias was a major problem, and everything I've read since then convinces me that I was right. Which is exactly the problem: our brains hate finding out that they're wrong. Confirmation bias is our annoying habit of zeroing in like a laser-guided missile on any scrap of evidence that supports what we already believe, and blithely ignoring the possibly much, much larger piles of evidence that suggest we might have been completely misguided. At its mildest, this helps explain why we prefer to get our news from an outlet that broadly agrees with our political views. In a more extreme instance, it's why you can't argue a conspiracy theorist out of their beliefs, because we cherry-pick the events that back up our version of reality and discard the ones that don't. There's a well-known cognitive problem called [[The Dunning-Kruger effect]], it may be the patron saint of this book, First described by the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in their paper 'Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments', it provides evidence for something that every one of us can recognise from our own lives. People who are actually good at any particular skill tend to be modest about their own abilities; meanwhile, people with no skills or talent in the field wildly overestimate their own competence at it. We literally don't know enough about our own failings to recognise how bad we are at them. And so we blunder on, overconfident and blissfully optimistic about whatever it is we're about to get horribly, horribly wrong. (As the rest of this book will show, of all the mistakes our brains make, 'confidence' and 'optimism' may well be the most dangerous.) Greed and selfishness also play into another common mistake: that of us collectively ruining things for everybody because we each wanted to get an advantage for ourselves. In social science, this category of screw-ups goes by names like the 'social trap' or the 'tragedy of the commons', which is basically when a group of people all do things that on their own would be absolutely fine in the short term, but when lots of people do them together, it all goes horribly wrong in the long term. Often this means destroying a shared resource because we exploit it too much: for example; fishing an area of water so much the fish stocks can't replenish themselves. There's also a related concept in economics known as a 'negative externality’ - basically a transaction where both parties do well out of it, but. there's a cost that's paid elsewhere, by someone who wasn't even part of the transaction. Pollution is the classic example of that; if you buy something from a factory, that's a win for both you and the manufacturer, but it might be a loss for the people who live downstream of the toxic waste the factory pours out. Yet other manias are mass panics, often founded on rumours that play on our fears. That's why witch-hunts in one form or another have happened at some point in history in virtually every culture around the world (an estimated 50,000 people died across Europe during the witch manias that lasted from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries). ##### 5 OF THE WEIRDEST MANIAS IN HISTORY Dancing Manias Outbreaks of inexplicable, uncontrollable dancing were common in much of Europe between the 13oos and the 16oos, sometimes involving thousands of people. Nobody's entirely sure why. Well Poisoning Around the same time, mass panic at false rumours of wells being poisoned were also common - normally blamed on Jews. Some panics led to riots and Jewish homes being burned. Penis Theft Outbreaks of panic that malign forces are stealing or shrinking men's penises appear all around the world - blamed on witches in medieval Europe, on poisoned food in Asia, or on sorcerers in Africa. Laughing Epidemics Since the 196os, epidemics of unstoppable laughter have occurred in many African schools - one famous outbreak in Tanzania in 1962 lasted a year and a half, forcing schools to temporarily close. The Red Scare A classic 'moral panic', a wave of anti-communist hysteria swept the USA in the 1940s and 1950s, as the media and populist politicians spread the exaggerated belief that communist agents had infiltrated every part of US society. Around 13,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, humans started doing things very differ-ently. They had what you might describe as 'a change of lifestyle', and in this case it meant a lot more than cutting down on carbs and joining a gym. Rather than the traditional approach to obtaining food - namely, going to look for it - they hit upon the neat trick of bringing the food to them. They started planting crops. As the author Jared Diamond, a proponent of the 'agriculture was a horrible mistake' theory, put it in a 1987 article in Discover magazine: 'Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.' In short, we went for quantity over quality. Classic humans. ### AMAZING SIGHTS YOU'LL NEVER SEE, BECAUSE HUMANS RUINED THEM Nohmul A great Mayan pyramid, the finest Mayan remains in Belize, was torn down in 2013 by some building contractors because they wanted gravel for nearby roadworks. Slims River A vast river in Canada's Yukon territory that completely vanished in the space of four days in 2017, as climate change caused the glacier it flowed from to retreat. Ténéré Tree Famously the most isolated tree on the planet, alone in the middle of the Sahara Desert - until 1973, when despite it being the only tree for 250 miles, a drunk driver still managed to drive his. truck into it. ## 3. Life, Uh, Finds a Way The Four Pests campaign began in 1958, and it was a remarkable effort. A countrywide poster campaign demanded that every citizen, from the youngest to the oldest, do their duty and kill the shit out of as many animals as possible. 'Birds, it was declared, 'are public animals of capitalism. The people were armed with everything from fly-swatters to rifles, with schoolchildren being trained in how to shoot down as many sparrows as possible. Jubilant sparrow-hating crowds took to the streets waving flags as they joined battle with the birds. Sparrows' nests were destroyed and their eggs smashed, while citizens banging pots and pans would drive them from trees so they could never rest until, exhausted, they fell dead from the sky. In Shanghai alone, it was estimated that almost 200,000 sparrows died on the first day of hostilities. 'No warrior shall be withdrawn, the People's Daily wrote, 'until the battle is won.' The battle was, indeed, won. In terms of achieving its stated goals, it was a triumph - an overwhelming victory for humanity against the forces of small animals. In total, the Four Pests campaign is estimated to have killed 1,5 billion rats, 11 million kilograms of mosquitoes, 100 million kilograms of flies ... and a billion sparrows. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent what the problem with this was: those billion sparrows hadn't just been eating grain. They'd also been eating insects. In particular, they ate locusts. Suddenly freed from the constraints of a billion predators keeping their numbers down, the locusts of China celebrated like it was New Year every day. Unlike sparrows - who'd eat a bit of grain here and there - the locusts tore through the crops of China in vast, relentless devouring clouds. In 1959, an actual expert (ornithologist so-hsin Cheng, who had been trying to warn people how bad an idea this all was) was finally listened to, and sparrows were replaced on the list of official pests-we-want-to-kill by bed bugs. But by then it was too late; you can't just replace a billion sparrows on a whim once you've wiped them out. You'd hope that the basic lesson of this - don't fuck with nature unless you're very, very certain what the consequences will be, and even then it's probably still not a good idea - would have stuck. But that seems unlikely. In 2004, the Chinese government ordered the mass extermination of mammals from civet cats to badgers in response to the outbreak of the SARS virus, suggesting that humans' capacity for learning from their mistakes remains as tenuous as ever. ## 4. Follow the Leader 'Which came first, the leaders or the wars?' is a bit of a chicken-and-egg question, but the two certainly seem to go hand in hand - and unfortunately for everybody else, it's not something you can really opt out of if you'd rather stay as a small, egalitarian village. Of course, there are lots of different types of leaders, and plenty of ways that countries can end up stuck with them. You've got your different flavours of autocrat: the hereditary dynasties, the ruling by divine right, the seizing of power by force, and various types of dictator. Oh, and you've also got democratic elections. Let's start with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, a man who shaped our modern world to a quite staggering degree through his combination of a far-sighted vision and a brutal but effective approach to getting things done. Unfortunately for him, he also blew it with a classic bit of delusional super-villain-style overreach. What is a bit more surprising is what he used all his unprecedented centralised power and widespread communication networks for: in short, to make his subjects hunt for the elixir of life. It wasn't just stealing that marked Farouk out as perhaps not great king material. He was renowned for his appetite, partying and lavish lifestyle. Once described as 'a stomach with a head', after becoming king as a handsome teenager he rapidly ballooned in size to over 20 stone. He was so fond of his official car, a red Bentley, that he decreed that nobody else in Egypt could own a red car. He built up a vast collection of low-grade pornography. An inveterate and profligate gambler, he surrounded himself with a coterie of chancers, con artists and corrupt officials. Once, after having a nightmare in which he was being attacked by lions, he awoke and demanded to be taken to Cairo zoo, where he promptly shot their lions. You'd hope that the quality of rulers we get might have improved a little over time, but there are plenty of leaders from the modern era who can rival their historical counterparts for baffling awfulness. For example, Saparmurat Niyazov, who ruled Turkmenistan for over 20 years, from when it was still part of the Soviet Union, through independence, until his death in 2006, stands as a prime example of the fact that you can always build a cult of personality around a dictator, even if that dictator's personality is extremely stupid. Very few places have had a run of really terrible leaders quite like the one the Ottoman Empire suffered in the first half of the seventeenth century. Two of them usually have the words 'the Mad' retrospectively added to their names, which is never a good sign. Worse, the one who doesn't even get called 'the Mad' might have deserved it the most. The new sultan, Murad IV, had two major benefits for the power players in the Ottoman court: (a) he was not obviously mad, and (b) he was an 11-year-old child. His mother Kösem, who was a remarkably skilled power player herself, got a good few years of ruling on behalf of a puppet sultan out of this arrangement. That was before Murad IV grew old enough to reveal that, if not actually mentally unsound, he was at least an utter, utter bastard. By the end of his reign, Murad wasn't even really executing people any more, as that implies he at least had some sort of vague pretext. He was pretty much just running round with a sword, pissed out of his skull, killing any poor bastard he came across. Some estimates suggest that he might have personally executed around 25,000 people during just 5 years of his 17-year reign - which on average would be more than 13 every single day. Again, it's really worth emphasising that this is the guy who doesn't get 'the Mad' attached to his name. Ibrahim's search for his ideal woman, whether or not prompted by a bovine encounter, ended with her being found in Armenia. She was named Sugar Cube, and she quickly became Ibrahim's favourite. Things start spiralling out of control a bit at this point: at some point, Sugar Cube told Ibrahim that one of his other concubines had been unfaithful, which sent Ibrahim into such a rage that he slashed his own son's face with a knife for joking about it, and then - being unable to tell which woman was the supposedly guilty one - had all but two of his 280-strong harem tied up in sacks and drowned in the Bosphorus. Only one survived. Sometime after this, fearing Sugar Cube's growing influence, Kösem invited her over for dinner and a little girl chat, during which she quickly murdered her. (She told Ibrahim that Sugar Cube had died of a sudden illness) James VI and I Not the worst king ever - he unified the crowns of Scotland, England and Ireland and commissioned a solid Bible - but he was obsessed with witch hunting, personally supervising witch torture and writing a book about his great witch-hunting exploits. ## 5 People Power Still, as unorthodox as electing non-human politicians might be, if you want to achieve a really impressive democratic screw-up, your best bet is still to elect a human - as demonstrated by the fact that making a brand of foot powder mayor isn't even the worst electoral decision in Ecuador's recent history. Instead, that honour probably goes to the election of Abdalá Bucaram as the country's president in 1996. Bucaram, a former police commissioner, mayor and occasional rock singer who campaigned under the self-bestowed nickname 'El Loco' (The Madman), #### Hitler So it's worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show. .. within two months, Hitler had seized complete control of the German state, persuading the Reichstag to pass an act that gave him power to bypass the constitution, the presidency and the Reichstag itself. What had been a democracy was, suddenly, not a democracy any more. Why did the elites of Germany so consistently underestimate Hitler? Possibly because they weren't actually wrong in their assessment of his competency - they just failed to realise that this wasn't enough to stand in the way of his ambition. As it would turn out, Hitler was really bad at running a government. As his own press chief Otto Dietrich later wrote in his memoir The Hitler I Knew, 'In the twelve years of his rule in Germany Hitler produced the biggest confusion in government that has ever existed in a civilised state.' We tend to assume that when something awful happens there must have been some great controlling intelligence behind it. It's understandable: how could things have gone so wrong, we think, if there wasn't an evil genius pulling the strings? The downside of this is that we tend to assume that if we can't immediately spot an evil genius, then we can all chill out a bit because everything will be fine. But history suggests that's a mistake, and it's one that we make over and over again. Many of the worst man-made events that ever occurred were not the product of evil geniuses. Instead they were the product of a parade of idiots and lunatics, incoherently flailing their way through events, helped along the way by overconfident people who thought they could control them. ## 6 War. Huh. What Is It Good For? It's estimated that between 90 and 95 per cent of all known societies have engaged in war on a fairly regular basis; the few that mostly manage to avoid it tend to be relatively isolated ones that stuck with a nomadic, foraging or hunter-gatherer lifestyle. There is one notable historical exception to this, though - [[the Harappan civilisation]] that existed in the Indus Valley from 5,000 years ago, stretching across parts of modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Rising at around the same time as those in Mesopotamia and Egypt, [[The Harappan civilisation]] was an advanced society with a population in the millions. Hitler's orders to stay and fight in the bitter cold rather than retreating didn't bring him any greater success; it just killed more of his soldiers. For the second time, an army that had conquered much of continental Europe was catastrophically weakened by a needless invasion of Russia, and the tide of the war was turned. As a bonus, at about the same time, Germany's allies in Japan were busy launching their own badly-thought-through attack on Pearl Harbour that needlessly dragged a superpower into a war theyd been trying to stay out of. Without those two woefully poor choices, the Axis powers might have won. Proving that just sometimes, humans' extremely poor decision-making skills can work out for the best in the long run (at least assuming you're not a fan of Hitler). It was 1953, and French general Henri Navarre's goal was to inflict a crushing and humiliating defeat on the communist Viet Minh forces (who were doing an annoyingly good job of rebelling against colonial rule in French Indochina) in order to weaken their hand in the imminent peace negotiations. So he decided to set an extremely clever trap for them. He built a major new French base in a remote area, threatening Viet Minh supply lines, and tried to draw them into a fight. The base at Điện Biên Phủ was surrounded by mountains covered in thick jungle, which gifted the Vietnamese the advantage of cover and high ground. The French were a long way from reinforcements. It was simply too tempting a target for the Viet Minh to resist. But (the plan went) superior French technology would defeat them easily: France's air dominance would allow them to fly in supplies, while French firepower would triumph in the battle, as transporting heavy artillery through the jungle would be impossible for the Viet Minh. Excellent plan. Navarre had his men set up the base, and then waited. And waited. For months, nothing happened. No attack came. What were the Viet Minh doing? Turns out that what they were doing was transporting heavy artillery through the jungle. A combination of Vietnamese troops and local civilians spent those months disassembling their weapons, carrying them piece by backbreaking piece across miles of thickly forested mountain to iện Biên Phủ and then putting them back together. After that, they simply waited for the rainy season to start, and once the French forces were stuck in the mud and the French planes couldn't see where to drop supplies, they attacked. Navarre's men, who had been expecting doomed suicidal foot charges by peasants carrying outdated rifles, were surprised to come under sustained bombardment from advanced artillery that wasn't supposed to exist. #### Bay of Pig's Ear The American debacle when they tried to invade Cuba via the Bay of Pigs isn't just a classic example of groupthink in action - it's literally where we get the word from. It was coined by psychologist Irving Janis based in large part on his study of how the Kennedy administration managed to get things so wrong. The basic plan went like this: the US would train up a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, who would mount an invasion with American air support. Upon seeing their initial easy victories against the ramshackle Cuban military, the people of the island would greet them as liberators and rise up against the communists. Simple. It was what they'd already done to Guatemala, after all. The wheels started to come off when John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon to the presidency. The plan had been developed with the assumption that Nixon, previously the vice president and a supporter of the scheme, would be the new man in the Oval Office. Kennedy was considerably less gung-ho and, not unreasonably, worried about starting a war with the Soviets, so he insisted on some changes: US backing for the operation had to remain completely secret (so no air support), and the landing site had to be changed to somewhere far from large civilian populations, somewhat undermining the 'trigger a popular uprising' element. At this point it should have been clear that the already fairly optimistic operation should just be scrapped, because it didn't make even a lick of sense any more. And yet everybody just carried on as though it did. Questions weren't asked, assumptions went unchal-lenged. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, an adviser to the Kennedy administration who opposed the plans, later said that the meetings about it took place in 'a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus, and that even though he thought the plan was stupid, in the meetings he found himself staying quiet. 'I can only explain my failure to do more than raise a few timid questions by reporting that one's impulse to blow the whistle on this nonsense was simply undone by the circumstances of the discussion, he wrote. In fairness, we've all been in meetings like that. The whole thing ended with the US a global laughing stock, Fidel Castro more firmly entrenched in power than ever, and over 1,000 invading troops captured, who a few years later the US would have to pay a ransom of over $5o million to free. #### The Chamber Pot Rebellion Robert Curthose was the eldest son of William the Conqueror, who was moved to open rebellion against his father when William didn't punish his two younger sons sufficiently after they tipped a full chamber pot over Robert's head. ## 7 Super Happy Fun Colonialism Party If things had gone a bit differently on Vinland, ideally with less murder, then history might genuinely have taken a different course. An established trading route between the Americas and Europe, with all the exchange of knowledge and skills that can lead to, might have resulted in a more gradual exposure between the two populations. It could have meant that the gap in technology and military might that made European colonisation in the sixteenth century such a one-sided affair would have been less dramatic. (It might also have given the Americans more time to slowly develop resistance to Old World infectious diseases, rather than getting hit with a mother lode of them all at once.) colonialism was bad. Really, really bad. How bad exactly? Well, one estimate of the deaths from European colonialism in the twentieth century alone puts the figure in the region of 50 million, placing it up there with the crimes of Hitler, Stalin and Mao - and that's in the century that colonial empires were collapsing. In the hundred years or so following the colonisation of the Americas, a fairly conservative estimate is that 90 per cent of the continent's population died from a combination of disease, violence and forced labour - again, a figure in the tens of millions. The only reason we can't be more specific is because it's hard to work out how many people were living there before; we literally don't know what we lost. Of course the death toll alone, awful as it is in its vagueness, doesn't tell the full story. The African slave trade, the invention of the concentration camp, sexual slavery in the Japanese empire, the Spanish encomienda system in the Americas (where conquistadors were personally awarded work gangs of native people, like start-up employees being given human stock options) - the list of horrors is long and almost unbearably grim. And you can add to that the myriad cultures wiped out, the history destroyed, and the vast illegitimate transfer of wealth from one part of the world to another, which is still evident in the relative prospects and comfort you're likely to enjoy today depending on which bit of the world you were born in. And nowhere is it more clear than in the deep, dark irony of perhaps the most horrifying single act of the colonial era - when [[King Leopold II]] of Belgium purchased a million square miles of the Congo Basin as his own personal property, which he turned into a mutilatory, for-profit holocaust of slave labour that resulted in the deaths of perhaps 10 million people over two decades. The irony is this: it was officially done in the name of charity. The land was granted in 1885 to a charitable organisation called the International African Association, set up by Leopold. This happened at the Berlin Conference - a meeting in which the countries of Europe carved up Africa between them, catalysing the 'Scramble for Africa' that took colonisation of the continent to new extremes. The International African Association's supposed philanthropic mission was to bring civilisation' to the people of the Congo. What it actually did was turn the entire country into an immense rubber plantation where the population were punished for failing to meet production targets by death, or by having their hands or feet or noses cut off. Because the Belgians wanted to make sure their forces weren't wasting expensive bullets on non-essential activities - anything other than killing - soldiers were expected to deliver a requisite number of severed hands to prove how many people they had killed. One bullet, one hand. Between 1698 and 1699, around 3,000 colonists set sail from Scotland, backed by a wave of nationalist sentiment and as much as half of the country's wealth, giddy with the hope of finding William Paterson's paradise and founding that empire. Before the century was out, they'd discovered it was very much not a paradise, most of them were dead, and the nation's wealth might as well have been hurled into the waters of the Atlantic. This was during the early peak of Europe's wild colonial expan-sion, and Scotland wanted in on the action. By the 16gos, the Spanish and the Portuguese had been absolutely coining it for the best part of two centuries on the resources they'd extracted from their American colonies; more recently, the English and the Dutch had joined the game to great success. The European scramble for global empires now covered Asia, Africa and the Americas, as the general strategy of 'turn up with guns and take all their stuff' continued to promise untold riches, with no sign of slowing down. The age of empire was also the age of financial revolution: as a result, much of the sharp end of colonialism was enacted not just directly by the states, but also by state-backed, publicly-traded "joint-stock' companies that blurred the lines between mercantile business and geopolitics. These included infamous behemoths like the English East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, and it was this model that Paterson sought to broadly replicate for his Darien venture. These companies had a global reach, tremendous wealth and a level of power that outstripped that of many states. Indeed, the companies often acted like states in their own right, and wielded incredible influence over the government of their own countries. (So very unlike today.) To put it mildly, [[The East India Company]] were not wild about the prospect of competition. They, along with much of the rest of London's mercantile community, had been spooked as hell by the financial troubles of the decade, and had recorded massive losses that year. At this point, the Company of Scotland hadn't settled on Panama as their goal and (in the entirely vain hope of keeping things super-secret) hadn't even mentioned the idea of an American expedition publicly. Instead, as the full name of the company suggested, they were selling the scheme as one that would focus on Africa or the East Indies. To which the East India Company's predictable response was, to roughly paraphrase, 'not on your fucking life'. And so the company whose wealth and power was inextricably tied up with the success of the English imperial project put their influence into action. This was the Company of Scotland's first lesson in the brutal realpolitik of global trade: that just because you say we want to do lots of international trade, and furthermore that you want to do it on your own wish-list of terms, doesn't mean that the rest of the world is simply going to agree with you. The English parliament held inquiries and ordered reports and threatened to impeach just about anybody who'd been involved in the Company. King William, taking the side of the English (to nobody's great surprise), let it be known that he was royally pissed off. At which point, all of those pledges of investment from London mysteriously vanished into nothingness. To begin with, things seemed pretty great. The settlers were awestruck by the location's natural beauty and the (to them) alien species, the land turtles and sloths and giant anteaters. The local Guba people seemed friendly, and spoke of gold mines just a few miles away. The settlers were delighted to discover a 'most excellent harbour', a naturally sheltered two-mile-long bay that one of them, Hugh Rose, believed was 'capable of containing 1,000 of the best ships in the world'. Another anonymous diarist wrote that 'The Soil is rich, the Air is good and temperate, and everything contributes to make it healthful and convenient' The swamps were more than unwholesome. The sickness that had already killed Paterson's wife started to take the colonists in ever larger numbers. It's not clear what it was, as they merely recorded it as 'the fever', but the best bet is malaria or yellow fever thanks to mosquitoes in those nearby swamps. (Both diseases of course were themselves colonists, having been helpfully brought over from the Old World by Europeans). The settlers were dying at an alarming rate. In total, somewhere near 3,000 people had sailed from Scotland for Darien. Between 1,500 and 2,000 are thought to have died either in the bay of Caledonia or on the seas. Many of the survivors never returned to Scotland. To this day, the story of Darien is one that divides Scotland. During the 2014 referendum on independence, it became a metaphor for both sides. For the nationalists, a parable of how England had always sought to sabotage and oppress Scottish hopes; for the unionists, a lesson in the dangers of abandoning stability in favour of unrealistic ambitions. Lewis Lasseter In 1930, Lasseter led a search party into the central Australian desert in search of a vast reef' made of pure gold that he claimed to have found years before. There's no such thing. Eventually the rest of his party abandoned him, then his camels ran away while he was doing a poo, and he died. ## 8 A Dummies' and/or Current Presidents' Guide to Diplomacy Diplomacy is the art of large groups of humans not being wankers to each other - or at the very least, managing to agree that okay, everybody is a wanker sometimes, but why don't we try to take it down a notch. Henán Cortés finally arrived at Tenochtitlan, accompanied by a few hundred Spanish soldiers and a load of his new allies, Moctezuma finally made his decision, despite lots of advisers telling him this was a really bad idea. In fairness, it's not clear if there was a right decision he could have made, but this was definitely the wrong one: he invited the Spanish in as honoured guests. He showered them with gifts, he gave them the best rooms, the works. This did not end well. Within a couple of weeks, Cortés staged a coup, took Moctezuma hostage in his own court and forced him to rule as a puppet. The first thing the Spanish demanded was dinner; after that, they promptly insisted he tell them where all the gold was kept. diplomatic choices are, to an extent, about trying to predict how power balances will shift in the future. Given that this is impossible to do with anything close to accuracy, it's not entirely surprising that people get it wrong so often. Look, international politics is really hard. There's not much room for lofty ideals, and the cold hand of pragmatism means you often have to make do with the allies you can get, rather than the allies you really want. But a lot of the problems we run into time and time again might be avoidable if we remembered that, most of the time, the enemy of our enemy is just as much of a bastard as the original enemy. For all its wild brutality, the Mongol Empire under Genghis was also surprisingly tolerant, to the point that he created possibly the world's first ever law enshrining freedom of religion. This had pragmatic benefits, of course: it was easier for opponents to see the benefits of surrender if they knew they weren't fighting a holy war, and it turned religious minorities everywhere into potential allies. big fan of tents and open plains, whose own god was the Eternal Blue Sky, Genghis never really saw the point of cities, other than as things to conquer. ## 9 The Shite Heat of Technology Francis Galton was undoubtedly a genius and a polymath, but also a creepy weirdo who had terrible ideas that led to dreadful consequences. In one of his more infamous investiga-tions, Galton toured the towns and cities of Britain in an attempt to create a map of where the women were most attractive. He would sit in a public space and use a device concealed in his pocket called a 'pricker' - a thimble with a needle in it that could puncture holes in a piece of marked paper - to record his opinion of the sexual desirability of every woman who walked past. It was that same combination of qualities - a compulsion to measure human traits and a complete lack of respect for the actual humanity of the people being measured - that led Galton to his most infamous contribution to the world of science: his advocacy of, and indeed coining of the term, 'eugenics'. He believed firmly that genius was entirely inherited, and that a person's success came from their inner nature alone, rather than fortune or circumstance. And so he believed that marriages between people deemed suitable for breeding should be encouraged, possibly with monetary rewards, in order to improve the stock of the human race; and that those who were undesirable, such as the feeble-minded or paupers, should be strongly discouraged from breeding. In the early part of the twentieth century, there was worldwide uptake of the eugenics movement, with Galton (now near the end of his life) seen as its hero. Thirty-one US states passed compulsory sterilisation laws - by the time the last had finally been repealed in the sixties, over 60,000 people in mental institutions in the United States had been forcibly sterilised, the majority of them women. A similar number were sterilised in Sweden's efforts to promote 'ethnic hygiene', where the law wasn't repealed until 1976. And of course in Nazi Germany ... well, you know what happened. Galton would no doubt have been horrified if he'd lived long enough to see what was being done in the name of the 'science' he created, but that doesn't make his original ideas any less wrong. Or there's Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet agricultural scientist whose profoundly bad ideas contributed to famines in both the USSR and (as mentioned way back in Chapter 3) China. Unlike Galton, Lysenko doesn't even have actual legitimate scientific advances to even out his legacy. He was just inordinately wrong. But if Lysenko's mistakes in biology were entirely enabled by communism, the next case was pure capitalism - the tale of a man who managed to make not one, but two of the most disastrous mistakes in the history of science, all within the space of one decade. The manner of his death is grimly ironic enough - but that's not the reason Tom Midgley is in this book. He's in this book because, incredibly, being killed in bed by his own invention doesn't even make it into the top two biggest mistakes of his life. In fact, by pretty much any standard, he has to rank as one of the most catastrophic individuals who ever lived. Lead's toxic nature wasn't a new discovery - it's been known for literally thousands of years. Before the first gas pump had even started supplying the new anti-knock fuel in early 1923, medical experts were warning that this was a terrible, terrible idea. William Clark of the US Public Health Service wrote in a letter that using tetraethyl lead presented a 'serious menace to public health' and predicted - entirely accurately - that 'on busy thoroughfares it is highly probable that the lead oxide dust will remain in the lower stratum'. In an even more upsettingly accurate prediction in 1924, a leading toxicologist foresaw that 'the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use ... before the public and the government awaken to the situation'. Backed by some woefully bad science, a rapacious desire to make money and the fact that powerful cars are cool and let you travel further, leaded fuel quickly became the standard around the world. Thanks to advances in the oil extraction game, the supposed fuel shortages that had prompted the work on anti-knock agents in the first place never materialised, so instead all the benefits from lead went towards making ever more powerful engines. The age of the automobile was here, and across the globe, more and more people started breathing in lead fumes. Midgley demonstrated its safety to great acclaim at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, theatrically inhaling a lungful of it and using it to blow out a candle. Non-toxic, non-flammable and an excellent refrigerant. Perfect. Indeed, he hadn't just discovered a new compound, he'd discovered a whole new class of them, all of which had similar properties. They became known as chlorofluorocarbons - or, to use the common abbreviation, CFCs. But it's also true to say that he shaped the modern world, often in unexpected ways. Anti-knock fuel led to cars becoming the dominant mode of transport in many parts of the world, and established them not just as tools but as status objects that became a potent symbol of personal identity and individualism. CFCs didn't just bring your domestic fridge into existence, they powered air conditioning too, without which many major world cities simply wouldn't exist in the same form as they currently do. His two inventions even teamed up: more powerful vehicles with inbuilt air con made regular long-distance driving a realistic, even enjoyable proposition. Large swathes of the American West and much of the Middle East, to take just two examples, would likely be very different places without Thomas Midgley's creations. ## 10 A Brief History of Not Seeing Things Coming Mary Ward was the first person in the history of the world to die in a car accident. Today, around the world an estimated 1.3 million people die in car accidents every year. The future keeps on inconveniently arriving faster than we were expecting, and we keep struggling to predict it. In 1871, Alfred Nobel said of his invention of dynamite: 'Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.' A few years after Nobel, in 1877, Richard Gatling, the inventor of the Gatling gun, wrote to a friend that he had hoped its invention would usher in a new, humanitarian era of warfare. He wrote how he was moved to invent it after he 'witnessed almost daily the departure of troops to the front and the return of the wounded, sick, and dead ... It occurred to me if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.' in 1897, the New York Times praised Hiram Maxim's invention of the fully automatic machine gun as being one so fearsome that it would stop wars from occurring, calling Maxim guns 'peace-producing and peace-retaining terrors' that because of their devastating effects, have made nations and rulers give greater thought to the outcome of war before entering upon projects of conquest'. In 1902, the eminent British scientist Lord Kelvin predicted in an interview that transatlantic flight was an impossibility, and that 'No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful! The Wright brothers flew their first flight 18 months later. As Orville Wright recalled in a letter from 1917: 'When my brother and I built and flew the first man-carrying flying machine, we thought we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible. That we were not alone in this thought is evidenced by the fact that the French Peace Society presented us with medals on account of our invention' In 1912, Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, predicted that 'The coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous.' In 1914, the world went to war. In 1966, the eminent designer Richard Buckminster Fuller predicted that by the year 2000, 'amid general plenty, politics will simply fade away. In 1977, Ken Olson, the president of the Digital Equipment Corporation, predicted that the computer business would always be niche, saying, "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.' In December of 2007, financial commentator Larry Kudlow wrote in the National Review: 'There's no recession coming. The pessimists were wrong. It's not going to happen... The Bush boom is alive and well. It's finishing up its sixth consecutive year with more to come. Yes, it's still the greatest story never told! In December of 2007, the US economy entered recession. (At the time of writing, Larry Kudlow is currently serving as the director of the National Economic Council of the United States.) ### Epilogue. Fucking Up the Future But if you were of a mind to put money on it, a sensible bet would be that we'll probably carry on making the exact same mistakes as we have in the past. Let's start with the obvious, then. Of all the stuff we've just casually dumped into the environment on the grounds that, eh, it'll probably be fine, it's the carbon we've been merrily burning up since the Industrial Revolution kicked off that's going to really spoil everybody's good times. This is what Donald Kessler predicted: that eventually space will become so crowded that this process will reach a tipping point, where each collision creates more and more collisions, until our planet is surrounded by an all-enveloping cloud of high-velocity garbage missiles. The result of this: satellites become useless, and launching into space becomes a deadly risk. We could become, effectively, earthbound. Whatever our future holds, whatever baffling changes come along in the next year, the next decade and the next century, it seems likely that we'll keep on doing basically the same things. We will blame other people for our woes, and construct elaborate fantasy worlds so that we don't have to think about our sins. We will turn to populist leaders in the aftermath of economic crises. We will scramble for money. We will succumb to groupthink and manias and confirmation bias. We will tell ourselves that our plans are very good plans and that nothing can possibly go wrong. `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:`