The Lessons of History

The Lessons of History describes recurring themes and trends throughout 5,000 years of human history, viewed through the lenses of 12 different fields, aimed at explaining the present, the future, human nature and the inner workings of states.

Competition is something that’s hardwired into our genes. Hunting, fighting, even killing was once the key to our survival, so it made sense for our genes to program us for it. Social cooperation only developed because it at some point became an even bigger advantage for surviving, and to this day, humans tend to only cooperate because it gives them a competitive edge, whether that’s in units of families, communities, companies or nations.

Just yesterday we learned that trying to bend humans into averages is useless, because it’s precisely when we embrace our uniqueness and individuality that we thrive.

Based on genetics alone, we are all fundamentally different from the moment we’re born, and just like we can’t become an exact copy of another person, no matter how much we train our bodies and brains, it does us no good to push equalities within societies to an extreme.

The more complex communities get, the more specialization they require, so the only way to keep up equality is to restrict human freedom. That’s why socialist systems rarely work, because only when you allow power, wealth and influence to be distributed unequally do you create enough freedom for an economy or nation to flourish and progress.

Can you imagine living in the Middle Ages? You probably only have a very vague idea of what that’d be like, right? However, Will Durant says human nature hasn’t changed all that much. Come to think of it, most of our evolution has been social, not biological. We still have the same basic desires to sleep, eat and reproduce, and if you took someone out of Ancient Greece and placed them in 2016, they could still survive just fine. The huge difference in their behavior would only be a cultural one. What has changed tremendously in the past 5,000 years are economics, politics, technology and morals, but since all these things aren’t directly linked to our biology, you could bring a baby from Ancient Rome to 2016 and it’d grow up like a normal person. These cultural changes are a result of trial and error. Since the dawn of mankind, people have put forward ideas in various forms, some of which have sunk into the hearts of millions of people (like Christian religion or Facebook), while others have been discarded (like Napoleon‘s vision of a French empire or the Nazi regime). However, we’re on the verge of upgrading our biology for the first time ever, as we might…