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

by Tom Phillips

  So it’s worth remembering that Hitler was actually an incompetent, lazy egomaniac and his government was an absolute clown show.

  In fact, this may even have helped his rise to power, as he was consistently underestimated by the German elite. Before he became chancellor, many of his opponents had dismissed him as a joke for his crude speeches and tacky rallies. He was a “pathetic dunderhead” according to one magazine editor; another wrote that his party was a “society of incompetents” and that people should not “overestimate the fairground party.”

  Even after elections had made the Nazis the largest party in the Reichstag, people still kept thinking that Hitler was an easy mark, a blustering idiot who could easily be controlled by smart people. Franz von Papen, the recently removed Chancellor of Germany, who was bitterly determined to reclaim power, thought that he could use Hitler as a pawn, and so entered into discussions with him to form a coalition government. After the deal was done in January 1933, making Hitler chancellor and von Papen vice chancellor, with a cabinet full of the latter’s conservative allies, von Papen was confident of his triumph. “We’ve hired him,” he reassured an acquaintance who tried to warn him he’d made a mistake. “In two months,” he predicted to another friend, “we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into a corner he’ll squeak.”

  That’s not how it worked out. In fact, 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 anymore.

  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 realize 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 civilized state.”

  Hitler hated having to read paperwork, and would regularly make important decisions without even looking at the documents his aides had prepared for him. Rather than having policy discussions with his underlings, he’d subject them to impromptu rambling speeches about whatever was on his mind—which they dreaded, as it would mean no more work could be done until he was finished.

  His government was constantly in chaos, with officials having no idea what he wanted them to do, and nobody was entirely clear who was actually in charge of what. He procrastinated wildly when asked to make difficult decisions, and would often end up relying on gut feeling, leaving even close allies in the dark about his plans. His “unreliability had those who worked with him pulling out their hair,” as his confidant Ernst Hanfstaengl later wrote in his memoir Zwischen Weißem und Braunem Haus. This meant that rather than carrying out the duties of state, they spent most of their time in-fighting and backstabbing each other in an attempt to either win his approval or avoid his attention altogether, depending on what mood he was in that day.

  There’s a bit of an argument among historians about whether this was a deliberate ploy on Hitler’s part to get his own way, or whether he was just really, really bad at being in charge of stuff. Dietrich himself came down on the side of it being a cunning tactic to sow division and chaos—and it’s undeniable that he was very effective at that. But when you look at Hitler’s personal habits, it’s hard to shake the feeling that it was just a natural result of putting a work-shy narcissist in charge of a country.

  Hitler was incredibly lazy. According to his aide Fritz Wiedemann, even when he was in Berlin he wouldn’t get out of bed until after 11:00 a.m., and wouldn’t do much before lunch other than read what the newspapers had to say about him, the press cuttings being dutifully delivered to him by Dietrich. But he didn’t even enjoy being in Berlin, where people kept on trying to get him to do stuff: he’d take any opportunity to leave the seat of government and go to his private country retreat in the Obersalzberg, where he’d do even less. There, he wouldn’t even leave his room until 2:00 p.m., and he spent most of his time taking walks, or watching movies until the small hours of the morning.

  He was obsessed with the media and celebrity, and often seems to have viewed himself through that lens. He once described himself as “the greatest actor in Europe,” and wrote to a friend, “I believe my life is the greatest novel in world history.” In many of his personal habits he came across as strange or even childish—he would have regular naps during the day, he would bite his fingernails at the dinner table and he had a remarkably sweet tooth that led him to eat “prodigious amounts of cake” and “put so many lumps of sugar in his cup that there was hardly any room for the tea.”

  He was deeply insecure about his own lack of knowledge, preferring to either ignore information that contradicted his preconceptions, or to lash out at the expertise of others—he was said to “rage like a tiger” if anybody corrected him. “How can one tell someone the truth who immediately gets angry when the facts do not suit him?” lamented Wiedemann. He hated being laughed at, but enjoyed it when other people were the butt of the joke (he would perform mocking impressions of people he disliked). But he also craved the approval of those he disdained, and his mood would quickly improve if a newspaper wrote something complimentary about him.

  Little of this was especially secret or unknown at the time. It’s why so many people failed to take Hitler seriously until it was too late, dismissing him as merely a “half-mad rascal” or a “man with a beery vocal organ.” In a sense, they weren’t wrong. In another, much more important sense, they were as wrong as it’s possible to get. Hitler’s personal failings didn’t stop him having an uncanny instinct for political rhetoric that would gain mass appeal, and it turns out you don’t actually need to have a particularly competent or functional government to do terrible things.

  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 GOVERNMENT POLICIES THAT DID NOT WORK OUT WELL

  Poll Tax

  The smartest minds in Margaret Thatcher’s government came up with what they thought a fairer tax: one where everybody, rich or poor, paid the same. It led to widespread nonpayment, large-scale riots and eventually Thatcher was forced to resign.

  Prohibition

  America’s efforts to ban the drinking of alcohol between 1920 and 1933 did lead to fewer people drinking—but it also allowed organized crime to monopolize the alcohol industry, making crime soar in many places.

  The Cobra Effect

  As pest control in Delhi, the British government offered a bounty for dead cobras. So people simply bred cobras to claim the bounty. So the British dropped the bounty. So people turned the worthless cobras loose. Result: more cobras.

  The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act

  As the Great Depression started to bite in 1930, the US introduced large tariffs on imports to try and prop up domestic industries. Instead, the resulting trade war only worsened the global depression.

  The Duplessis Orphans

  In Quebec in the 1940s and 1950s, the government offered church groups subsidies to care for both orphans and the mentally ill. B
ut the psychiatric payments were double that for orphans—so thousands of orphans were falsely diagnosed as mentally ill.

  Hoy No Circula

  In 1989, Mexico City tried to reduce air pollution by banning particular cars from being driven on certain days. Unfortunately, rather than taking the bus, people just bought more cars so they’d always have one that was legal to drive.

  6

  War. Huh. What Is It Good For?

  Humans are very keen on war. It is, in many ways, our “thing.” The oldest evidence in the archaeological record for organized mass violence dates back to around 14,000 years ago, at Jebel Sahaba in the Nile Valley, although let’s be honest, we’ve probably been having fights of some kind a lot longer. Meanwhile (as mentioned a couple of chapters ago), evidence from Oaxaca in Mexico suggests that pretty much as soon as people started living in villages, one village would try to raid another, and things would quickly escalate from there.

  It’s estimated that between 90 and 95 percent 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 civilization 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 civilization was an advanced society with a population in the millions. It had major cities that show sophisticated urban planning and boast things like plumbing and toilets and public baths, and it was home to a culture that produced innovative technology and art that was traded far and wide. And, it seems, it had basically no war. At all. Archaeologists have been excavating the remains of Harappan cities for a century now and they’ve found little evidence of settlements being raided or destroyed, only a few examples of significant fortifications or defenses, no depictions of warfare in Harappan art and nothing that suggests the existence of an army or large collections of military weapons. (And interestingly, unlike other comparable civilizations of the same period, they also haven’t found much in the way of monuments to great leaders.)

  This occasionally leads to a portrayal of the Harappans as some sort of idealized proto-hippies, which is a nice idea but probably closer to wishful thinking than reality. While they do seem to have been a pretty chill society who got on well with their neighbors, they also had the advantage of being geographically well protected from anybody who might have wanted to invade them, which certainly makes it a lot easier to not have wars. And it is of course possible that we simply haven’t found the evidence of war yet; if so, it wouldn’t be the first time that a civilization gained a reputation for pacifism only for later discoveries to completely ruin that reputation. The Harappan writing system still hasn’t been properly deciphered, so maybe one day we’ll decode it and find it says, “LOL, let’s hide all our war stuff to really confuse the archaeologists.”

  Still, for now it does seem that, at the exact same time other early civilizations were really leaning into the whole war and conquest thing, Harappan society managed to exist at its peak for 700 years without being troubled in any major way by external conflict. And then, for uncertain reasons, the Harappan civilization just kind of...fades out of history. Its people start moving away from the cities and returning to the countryside. The change in climate around 2200 BCE, which caused the decline of several other early civilizations, would have made the valley increasingly arid and less fertile; overpopulation and overfarming may have led to food shortages; and like all dense urban populations, they were more vulnerable to infectious diseases. Whatever the cause, by 3,500 years ago the cities had been almost entirely abandoned, and this brief no-war blip in humanity’s history was over. Meanwhile the rest of the world’s civilizations continued to grow and carry on doing war stuff.

  (The unsettling possibility here is that the Harappans’ key mistake was not having wars, and that civilization actually needs war to sustain itself. There’s your cheerful thought for the day.)

  Right now, we’re lucky enough to be living in a relatively peaceful period of history, though even so, you might have noticed we haven’t exactly been short of a war or two. The annual death tolls from wars around the world have been on a downward slope for several decades now, which some writers have suggested shows that we have in fact entered a new era of peace and rationality and international friendship. In honesty, though, it’s probably a bit soon to be claiming that: after all, the slope is heading down from history’s biggest peak in World War II. Humanity could just be having a bit of a breather before starting up again.

  In a book about failure, I hope it goes without saying that all wars are, to some extent, enormous failures on somebody’s part. But in addition to them being very bad things in their own right, the chaos and tunnel vision and general macho nonsense of wars also really heighten humanity’s innate capacity for failing hard in many other ways. War is a collective rush of blood to the head; to put it another way, it’s fuck-up central.

  Nowhere is this clearer than in the justly celebrated Battle of Cádiz, which should possibly be more accurately renamed the Piss-Up of Cádiz. In 1625, the English decided that they wanted to fuck up the Spanish good and proper. King James VI and I (of kingdom-unifying, Bible-commissioning and witch-hunting fame) had just died, leaving his large adult son Charles I in charge. Charles—demonstrating all the tact and judgment that would eventually see him minus a head—had held a grudge against Spain ever since they wouldn’t let him marry one of their princesses, and he wanted some payback. So he and his pals decided to kick it old-school and mount some piratical raids to steal all the gold and silver the Spaniards were shipping back from the Americas.

  In November that year, 100 ships and 15,000 troops of a joint English and Dutch expeditionary force sailed into the Bay of Cádiz in southwestern Spain. They were there to plunder, and they weren’t taking no for an answer. Granted, they were only in Cádiz because they’d been so disorganized and delayed that they’d completely missed the Spanish fleet and its treasure on its return from America, but still. It was payback time.

  Unfortunately, even before they reached Cádiz it had become apparent they’d not brought enough food or drink with them. So when the invading forces landed, the expedition’s commander, Sir Edward Cecil, decided to let his starving troops prioritize finding sustenance over, you know, fighting any battles. Naturally, his troops immediately did what English people abroad always do: they made a beeline for Cádiz’s wine stocks. And proceeded to get well and truly wankered.

  Upon realizing that his entire army was twatted, Cecil took the reasonable decision to abandon the plan entirely, and ordered his men to retreat to the ships and slink home in shame. Most of them did, eventually, but about 1,000 were so drunk that they just stayed lounging around Cádiz until the Spanish forces turned up and executed them all.

  And that’s how England failed to invade Cádiz.

  The English exploits in Cádiz often appear on lists of history’s greatest military failures—but to be entirely honest, if you ignore the bit about people being executed, it actually sounds pretty great. Turn up, don’t eat enough, get riotously pissed and lose a couple of your mates along the way: that’s a classic holiday. If instead of having wars, we just sent large groups of people to each other’s countries to drink loads of their wine and aimlessly wander around their towns on a regular basis, then the world would probably be a much, much happier place. Although now I’ve written that, it occurs to me that’s essentially what the EU is.

  Alcohol, you’ll be astonished to learn, plays a leading role in a number of the dumbest moments to have graced the battlefield—as is the case with the Not-Really-a-Battle of Karansebes in 1788. This was impressive for the way the Austrian army managed to suffer heavy losses in battle despite the fact that their oppo
nents never even turned up. In fact, their enemy (they were fighting the Ottoman Empire at the time) didn’t actually know the battle had happened until they came across the aftermath a little while later.

  Exactly what happened is, uh, somewhat murky. What’s fairly clear is that the Austrian army was retreating at night through the town of Karansebes (in modern-day Romania), keeping a wary eye out for the pursuing Turks. At this point, accounts of the incident diverge. In one telling, a unit of local troops from the Romanian region of Wallachia started to spread rumors that the Turks had arrived, in order to cause confusion so they could loot the baggage train. In another telling, a group of cavalry officers met a Wallachian farmer with a cartload of brandy and decided they’d had a long, hard day’s riding and deserved some downtime. After a while, a group of infantry turned up and pointedly inquired whether the cavalry were planning on sharing the brandy with their foot-soldier brethren, at which point things got...rowdy.

  Whatever the cause (the divergent tales have the definite ring of every unit of the army trying to blame another unit of the army), most sources seem to agree that things come to a head when somebody fires a shot into the air, and then somebody else starts shouting, “The Turks, the Turks!” The (quite possibly drunk) cavalrymen think it’s serious, and so naturally they start riding around shouting, “The Turks, the Turks!” as well. At which point everybody panics like fuck and starts trying to flee from the imaginary Turkish forces. In the darkness and confusion and probably drunkenness, two columns of troops cross each other, both mistake the other for the dreaded enemy and they begin firing wildly on each other.