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A review by tanja_alina_berg
Humans: A Brief History of How We F**ked It All Up by Tom Phillips
4.0
Did you have a bad day? Read this book. It will give you a multitude of examples, large and small, of people fucking it up a lot worse than you. At the same time that is absolutely horrifying, exemplifying time and again our incapability of learning from past mistakes, it is also entertaining and educational. A rare combination.
As an example of the list "fuck ups I have never heard about" is Mao Zedong's Fours Pests campaign. "The most disastrous entirely successful public health policy ever". The Chinese dictator decided that mosquitoes, rats, flies and sparrows to this list. He figured that sparrows ate grain and that that without sparrows "60000 extra people could be fed for every millions sparrows that were eliminated". A billion sparrows died. Locusts came at the harvests. Sparrows weren't eating grain as much as pests. This caused a famine that killed between 15 and 30 million people.
"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."
Don't worry, people from all walks of life get a bashing in this book. It's definitely readable and no matter how much else you've covered on the subject, you're likely to find something new here. And if you have a shitty day, you can take comfort in the fact that you did not invent leaded gasoline or freon and kill millions by pollution and further with increased radiation through the ozone hole. That was just the one guy by the way, Thomas Midgley Jr.
If your looking for hope, well, I'm not sure this is the book to read. However, to be able to do anything about the current state of the world you really need to know how incredibly large our capacity for screwing things up really is, in order to be able to circumvent some of it.
As an example of the list "fuck ups I have never heard about" is Mao Zedong's Fours Pests campaign. "The most disastrous entirely successful public health policy ever". The Chinese dictator decided that mosquitoes, rats, flies and sparrows to this list. He figured that sparrows ate grain and that that without sparrows "60000 extra people could be fed for every millions sparrows that were eliminated". A billion sparrows died. Locusts came at the harvests. Sparrows weren't eating grain as much as pests. This caused a famine that killed between 15 and 30 million people.
"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."
Don't worry, people from all walks of life get a bashing in this book. It's definitely readable and no matter how much else you've covered on the subject, you're likely to find something new here. And if you have a shitty day, you can take comfort in the fact that you did not invent leaded gasoline or freon and kill millions by pollution and further with increased radiation through the ozone hole. That was just the one guy by the way, Thomas Midgley Jr.
If your looking for hope, well, I'm not sure this is the book to read. However, to be able to do anything about the current state of the world you really need to know how incredibly large our capacity for screwing things up really is, in order to be able to circumvent some of it.