Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up

by Tom Phillips

  By this point, Ibrahim’s excesses had alienated pretty much everybody, and the cost of keeping him in his lavish lifestyle of sex and fur was draining public funds. He had several sons, and so the dynasty was no longer under threat. Even Kösem agreed things had gone too far, and signed off on a plan to depose him. And so for the second time in a couple of decades, the Janissaries revolted; a mob dismembered the grand vizier, and they marched Ibrahim back to his dreaded Cage. He spent the last 10 miserable days of his life back in the same place where he’d spent most of his childhood, before the plotters decided to take the quick route out and murdered him.

  The history of this period in the Ottoman Empire reads so much like a bloody, misogynist fever dream—something that makes Game of Thrones look like an episode of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross—that it’s occasionally hard to believe. And to be sure, it’s another case where it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish what was real and what was simply propaganda to justify all the political upheaval and murders.

  The story of this time in history isn’t just one of crazed men, and a few powerful women trying to keep things stable; across large parts of the world it was an era of new technology and dramatic economic shifts, with allegiances in flux, borders being redrawn and wars all over the place. The Ottoman Empire was no exception. By the second half of the seventeenth century, when they finally left this period of instability, the Ottomans had waved goodbye to the era of institutional fratricide and civil war, had a newly monetized economy and had effectively changed their system of government from a feudal absolutist monarchy to a modern bureaucracy. So far from this being the point that marked the start of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, on the whole, they actually came out of it all pretty well!

  That’s probably not much comfort to all the people who got murdered, though.

  5 MORE LEADERS WHO REALLY SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN PUT IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING

  Kaiser Wilhelm II

  Germany’s Wilhelm II believed himself to be a master negotiator with a diplomatic golden touch. In fact, his only gift was insulting just about every other country he came into contact with, which may help explain how World War I happened.

  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.

  Christian VII

  Christian VII of Denmark was a poor king in many ways, but probably his obsessive, uncontrollable masturbation was the least kingly aspect of it.

  Tsar Peter III

  Was just really into toy soldiers. Didn’t consummate his marriage to Catherine (later “the Great,” after she deposed him) for years because he was too busy playing with them, and once had a rat court-martialed after he found it nibbling one of his toys.

  Charles VI

  Best known for the delusional belief that he was made of glass and might shatter at any moment, Charles VI of France’s sad reign ended shortly after the English tricked him into signing a treaty that declared the English monarchy heirs to the French throne—basically guaranteeing many more years of war.

  5

  People Power

  Thanks to the capacity of autocratic rulers to make grand, operatic screw-ups on a horrifying scale, over the course of history various states have tried to mitigate this by trying out a little thing called “democracy.” With, it has to be said, varying degrees of success.

  Quite where democracy was first tried out is somewhat disputed—forms of collective decision-making were almost certainly a feature of early small societies. There’s also some evidence for something at least approaching democracy in India about 2,500 years ago. But generally, it’s the Greek city-state of Athens that gets the credit for adopting and codifying democratic government at around the same time, in 508 BCE.

  Of course, many of the key features of a democracy (government being open to all citizens, and elections in which citizens can replace their government if they don’t like it) do rather depend on who gets to count as a citizen. And for much of history, across many countries, that hasn’t included a few insignificant little categories of people—such as women, or poor people, or ethnic minorities. I mean, you can’t give power to just anybody, right?

  Another problem with democracy is that people are generally big fans of it when they think it might give them power, but suddenly become notably less keen when it looks like it might take power away from them. As a result, democracy often involves a frankly exhausting amount of work simply to ensure it keeps on existing.

  For example, Rome experimented with various cunning techniques to stop democracy sliding into autocracy. One was to split the position of consul—the most powerful elected role, which combined both civil and military leadership—between two people. They’d be elected for a year, would swap holding the most significant powers every month and were each given command of two of the four legions of the Roman army. Which is a pretty clever way to make sure that absolute power doesn’t fall into any single man’s hands.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t ideal when all four legions of the army were required for a single battle—as happened at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE, when Rome was faced with the assembled might of the Carthaginian forces commanded by noted elephant fan Hannibal. In that case, command of the army swapped between the two consuls, Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro, on a daily basis. A problem that was compounded by the fact that they didn’t agree on tactics. One day the cautious Paullus would be in charge, the next the more reckless Varro, and so on. Hannibal, who wanted to draw the Romans into battle, simply waited a day until Varro was in charge, at which point he got his wish. The result was the Roman army was virtually wiped out.

  The Romans actually had a way of stopping this kind of division happening—they would appoint a “dictator,” one man who would be given absolute power in times of crisis, on the understanding that he would resign once the specific job he’d been given the power for was done. (Ironically, just before the Battle of Cannae, the Roman Senate had got rid of a dictator because they didn’t like his tactics.) Again, this was a great idea in theory, but it did rather rely on the person you’d just gifted with absolute power and the command of a vast army subsequently giving it up willingly. Which they mostly did, until an ambitious chap called Julius Caesar decided that he quite liked the power and actually he’d rather keep it, if it’s all the same to you. That ended stabbily for Caesar, but his successors also decided that absolute power was an excellent thing to have, and so the Roman Republic quickly turned into the Roman Empire.

  Some of the approaches that democratic systems have taken to prevent the power-hungry from gaining undue influence over proceedings have been quite remarkable. If you get confused by, say, the electoral college system in the United States, then be thankful you didn’t live in the Republic of Venice. Several centuries before the word doge became a popular internet dog meme featuring a picture of a baffled yet placid Shiba Inu, Venice was ruled by a doge, a leader who was elected by possibly the most complicated electoral college system ever.

  Given that the doge was elected for life by a Great Council of a hundred or so oligarchs—a setup with obvious potential for corruption—the electoral system was established in 1268 with the intent of preventing anybody from being able to fix the election. Here is how the Doge of Venice was elected: first 30 members of the council were chosen by randomly drawing lots. From these, lots would be drawn again, reducing the number of electors to 9. Those 9 would then elect 40 council members, who would then be whittled down to 12 by lot. Those 12 would elect 25 members, who would again be reduced by lot to 9, who would elect 45, who would be reduced by lot to 11, who would then elect 41 members—and finally, on the tenth round of the whole process, those 41 would elect the doge.

  Try reading
that out loud without taking a breath.

  This is obviously completely ridiculous, and must have been a bloody nightmare for Venetian political pundits trying to make predictions. But in fairness to the oligarchs of Venice, it does seem to have been pretty successful (if you were a Venetian oligarch, that is) as the system stayed in place for over 500 mostly prosperous years, until the Republic of Venice was finally conquered by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797.

  Frankly that makes Venice a beacon of stability, especially when you consider that at the time of writing, Italy has, notoriously, had 66 governments and 44 prime ministerships in the 73 years of the postwar period. By contrast, the UK has had just 15 prime ministerships over the same period (in both cases, some people have held the role more than once, hence “prime ministerships” rather than “prime ministers”). That “at the time of writing” is quite important, because Italy is currently governed by a coalition of populists and far-right nationalists that doesn’t exactly scream stability. By the time it’s published, they may be on to government number 67 and prime minister 45 or possibly more. As such, in the interests of accuracy, here is that fact again, with an empty space so you can write an updated number for how many governments Italy has had:

  Italy has had [ ] governments since 1946.

  (Please visit howmanygovernmentshasitalyhad.com for the current figure.)

  One of the problems with democracy’s fragility is that policies that may have seemed reasonable under a nice fluffy liberal democracy can start to backfire rather horribly when a more authoritarian regime takes over. For an example, look to Mexico in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the Mexican authorities—newly independent from Spain—decided to put the underdeveloped land in their northern province of Texas to good use. Wanting a buffer zone that would protect Mexico from both raids by the Comanche people and the westward growth of the United States, the Mexicans started encouraging American ranchers and farmers to come and settle in the area, handing over large tracts of land to empresarios, agents who would encourage Americans to make the move (the fact that there was no extradition treaty may have been a big factor for some people).

  They started to realize that this was going a bit wrong when it became apparent that some empresarios were gaining significant political power—and many settlers were unwilling to integrate and obey the laws of the Mexican government. Freaked out, in 1830 the Mexicans abruptly tried to ban any further American migration, but found themselves powerless to stop the influx of American immigrants pouring across the border.

  Things came to a head when the (relatively) liberal Mexican government was replaced by an autocratic, authoritarian ruler in president Antonio López de Santa Anna, who in 1835 dissolved the Mexican congress and pushed through major changes to the country’s constitution that centralized power, effectively making him a dictator. He also started to forcefully suppress dissent in Texas, a crackdown on the American immigrant community that only inflamed tensions further—and soon a full-scale rebellion was on the cards. By 1836, after a war that included the infamous events of the Alamo, Texas had declared its independence. By 1845, it was part of the ever-expanding United States, and rather than having a useful buffer against American expansion, Mexico had lost a valuable province.

  There are a couple of divergent lessons we can draw from this. On the one hand, there’s “don’t encourage immigration only to later turn against those same immigrant communities.” On the other, there’s also “don’t assume that you’ll always be a democracy because THAT’S EXACTLY WHEN THINGS GO WRONG.”

  Democracy, of course, does rely somewhat on the voters making good decisions in the first place. For example, in 1981 the small Californian town of Sunol elected a dog as their mayor. Bosco Ramos, a black Labrador mix, beat two human candidates in a landslide victory after his owner, Brad Leber, entered him into the race following an evening of talking shit at a local bar. In fairness to Bosco and the voters of Sunol, this actually seems to have worked out fine—Bosco was widely hailed as a very good boy, and served as mayor for over a decade, ending only with his death in 1994. One resident recalled to the San Jose Mercury News in 2013 that the mayor “used to hang in all the bars and he used to growl at you if you didn’t feed him,” and he was rumored to have fathered numerous puppies with different bitches around town, which sounds like pretty standard politician behavior to be honest. Bosco is fondly remembered in Sunol, where a bronze statue of him stands to this day, and his tenure only involved one major international incident—when in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre the Chinese newspaper People’s Daily used the example of Bosco to attack Western democracy on the grounds that “there is no distinction between people and dogs.” Bosco ended up joining a group of Chinese students on a pro-democracy protest outside the Chinese consulate in San Francisco.

  Bosco’s election may have been unexpected, but he doesn’t even come close to being the weirdest nonhuman victor of an election. That honor probably goes to Pulvapies, a brand of foot powder that was elected mayor of the Ecuadorian town of Picoaza in 1967. Pulvapies wasn’t even officially standing in the election, but its maker did run a joke marketing campaign across the country with the slogan “Vote for any candidate, but if you want well-being and hygiene, vote for Pulvapies.” Come election day, Pulvapies received thousands of write-in votes in several areas—and in Picoaza, the foot powder somehow managed to come out in first place, much to the chagrin of the numerous human candidates.

  Still, as unorthodox as electing nonhuman 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 honor 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”), was swept to a shock victory after a populist presidential campaign that attacked the country’s elites. As a police commissioner he had been notorious for the way he “chased down women wearing miniskirts, jumping off his motor scooter and ripping out hems to make their skirts longer,” as the New York Times reported when he was elected. As a mayor he also had a track record of shaking down local businesses for payments, and in 1990 he had fled to Panama to avoid corruption charges. During the presidential election campaign, his unconventional rallies and campaign adverts—which often involved him singing, accompanied by the band that went everywhere with him on the campaign trail—galvanized the country’s working class, who were promised that Bucaram would bring an end to the neo-liberal policies of privatization and austerity that the nation’s political class were committed to. Things that might have proved career-ending for other politicians—you know, stuff like the way he had a Hitler mustache and once said that Mein Kampf was his favorite book—didn’t seem to be much of a barrier to his success.

  Once he was in power, the country’s poor who had voted for him were somewhat surprised at the economic plan he unveiled a few months into his term: a neo-liberal program that extended privatization and doubled down on austerity, the exact things he’d been elected to stop. Oh, and he tried to remove the term limits on the presidency. And went off-script in his speech announcing the economic policy to mount a lengthy attack on a newspaper that had been critical of him.

  He continued his commitment to eccentric behavior while in office, including releasing a song titled “A Madman Who Loves,” meeting with Lorena Bobbitt (the woman who became famous for cutting off her husband’s penis) and selling his Hitler mustache for charity. Also, if press reports at the time were accurate (again, it can occasionally be hard to tell what accusations are true and what are just scuttlebutt), he also put his teenage son in unofficial charge of the customs service, and they reportedly threw a party celebrating the s
on making his first million dollars. The minimum wage in Ecuador at the time was $30 a month, so you can see why that might have annoyed some people.

  Not unsurprisingly, popular opinion rather quickly turned against Bucaram, prompting massive street protests against his reign, and he was impeached and removed from the presidency a mere six months into his term, on the grounds that he was “mentally incompetent.” (That was almost certainly just a pretext, but if you’re going to campaign as “El Loco,” then you probably haven’t left yourself much of a leg to stand on.) He was also charged with embezzling millions of dollars, and promptly fled—again—to exile in Panama. There are various lessons that we can take from all this, but probably the main one is: “If somebody has a Hitler mustache, then, uh, that might be a bit of a red flag?”

  Speaking of which...you can’t really talk about democracy’s capacity to go rapidly and nightmarishly wrong without talking about, well, Hitler.

  Hitler

  Look, I know what you’re thinking. Putting Hitler in a book about the terrible mistakes we’ve made as a species isn’t exactly the boldest move ever. “Oh wow, never heard of him, what a fascinating historical nugget” is something you’re probably not saying right now.

  But beyond him being (obviously) a genocidal maniac, there’s an aspect to Hitler’s rule that kind of gets missed in our standard view of him. Even if popular culture has long enjoyed turning him into an object of mockery, we still tend to believe that the Nazi machine was ruthlessly efficient, and that the great dictator spent most of his time...well, dictating things.