The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

by Robert Trivers

  In Hispaniola, he and his men immediately demanded food, gold, spun cotton, and access to the local women. Indians were put to work mining gold, raising Spanish food, and even carrying the Spaniards around wherever they went. Minor offenses by Indians were punished by mutilation—an ear, a nose, both hands. Failing to find gold, Columbus started slave capture and transmission on a large scale, returning to Spain with five hundred Indians (almost half dying on the way) and leaving five hundred slaves behind. He launched a reign of sadistic terror: newborns given to dogs as food or smashed against rocks in front of their screaming mothers, twenty thousand killed in Hispaniola alone, with more to come on nearby islands. Mass suicide and regular infanticide were common responses by the Indians to the horrors they were experiencing. To make a long story shorter, a mere twenty-five years later when Columbus and his immediate heirs were done with Hispaniola, its Indian population had been reduced from an estimated five million people to fewer than fifty thousand. This was a story to be repeated in North, Central, and South America except that in the mainland tropics you could never exterminate everyone, especially those living deeper or higher in the forest. Neither the invention of ships nor means of navigation allowed this conquest and holocaust to take place; it was the invention of large guns, which could be attached to sturdy ships and supported by an array of smaller guns and aggressive weapons. It was the invention of high-tech war across the sea that brought about the new wave of colonization and genocide.

  The point is that our retrospective re-creation of the “founding of the Americas” minimizes the sordid details of murder, slavery, sexual exploitation, and degradation with which it began. Instead it exalts simple exploration and discovery. Thus do we deny the motives and the reality of the territorial takeover. The benefit is self-glorification and continuation of the same kind of behavior; the cost is much more long-term, depending partly on the reaction of the survivors to this kind of behavior.

  The holocaust was repeated up and down the Americas: one part introduced diseases to which the local people had little or no resistance, and one part heartless slaughter—women, children, the elderly, all members of village after village after village put to the sword—in what has been described as the longest-running genocide in the world. No longer in the United States, where Amerindians were long ago wiped out with a few remnants held on “reservations,” but throughout Central and South America the slaughter of indigenous peoples continues apace. In Guatemala the renewed attacks coincided with a US-supported coup in 1953. For the next fifty years, hundreds of thousands of Amerindians were killed in generalized anticommunist warfare. During the great Spanish-imposed holocaust of the 1500s and immediately afterward, local populations were more than decimated (to 5 percent or fewer of their original numbers) due to both introduced diseases and genocidal behavior on a large scale.

  An important difference between what became the United States and countries north and south of it is that the pre–United States consisted of prime temperate-zone land, with neither the cold of the Arctic nor the overwhelming biological competition in the tropics, which chiefly comes from antagonistic life forms such as diseases, both human and crop. Thus removal of the original population from this space resulted in huge opportunities for rapid growth of the new powerful European industrial system. Stealing nearly half of Mexico greatly increased the available space.

  And the rationale for the genocide? Manifest destiny. Very simple. A religious and racial concept: you were destined by God to do exactly what you did. “Might makes right,” but with a more exalted ring. And the value of the rationale? Keep on doing what you are doing. Today the intellectuals rationalizing American misbehavior along these lines are fond of speaking about “American exceptionalism.” Somehow America is exempt from the usual laws of history and reality. We are the exceptional case and permitted—no, required—to act appropriately. We are the new chosen people of the Bible, as we have seen ourselves now for more than two hundred years (see the following section “Christian Zionism”).

  How many of us Americans know that the Founding Fathers we venerate explicitly urged the eradication of Amerindians—genocide—by any means necessary: terror, starvation, inebriation, deliberate infection with smallpox, and outright slaughter?• President George Washington (stated at the time of open warfare): The immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more.

  • President Thomas Jefferson: This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate.

  • President Andrew Jackson: They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.

  • Chief Justice John Marshall: The tribes of Indians inhabiting the country were savages.... Discovery [of America by Europeans] gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest.

  • President William Henry Harrison: Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population and to be the seat of civilization?

  • President Theodore Roosevelt: The settler and pioneer have at bottom, had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.

  No one seems self-conscious in the slightest about the links between explicit racism, claims of divine design, and calls for “extirpation” of entire peoples—all to the advantage of one’s own people.

  CONTROL THROUGH SMALL WARS AND INSTALLED PROXIES

  Most Americans have no idea how often the United States has gone to war, that is, invaded another country with its troops. For nearby countries, such visits are a regular occurrence. To take but World War I, when the United States was engaged in a major war against Germany and its allies in Europe, it still managed to invade the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Panama, and Mexico (multiple times) while permanently stationing troops in Nicaragua. Surely this is an admirable achievement. The usual rationale was instability threatening Americans and American property, but the actual function was typically to subvert local democracy in favor of American business interests. Presidents were replaced, assemblies dissolved, new and biased constitutions rushed through rigged plebiscites, and so on.

  After World War I, in Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Panama, the Monroe Doctrine—the notion that the United States reigns supreme in the New World—was enforced (or, in Cuba’s case, was attempted) through armed invasions, local militias, and internal subversion. Most invasions set the stage for a series of dictators serving US interests: Batista, Trujillo, Duvalier, and Samosa. In Franklin Roosevelt’s famous words (about Samosa), “He maybe a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Of course, such a person is much more useful to you (in the short term) than someone trying to serve his own people’s interests. The long term is another matter. The replacement of Mossadegh, the Iranian nationalist, in 1953 with a puppet, the shah, may have given temporary economic benefit to the United States, but certainly it helped produce a long-term disaster.

  The United States invaded Nicaragua thirteen times in the twentieth century before turning the murderous Contras loose on them in the 1980s, when the Nicaraguans finally voted for socialism. The country remains the second-poorest in the Americas, second only to Haiti, another country that has enjoyed frequent US invasions (including a twenty-year occupation). The Brazilian adventure was typical. A US-supported military cou
p in 1965 overthrew the democratically elected and mildly socialist government, instituting a reign of terror and laying the groundwork for similar events in Argentina and Chile, with combined mortality running into the hundreds of thousands. The US ambassador to Brazil at the time put the matter succinctly, in the best tradition of false historical narratives: The coup was “the most decisive victory for freedom in the mid twentieth century.” The “democratic forces” now in power would “create a greatly improved climate for private investment.” Thus is a false historical narrative maintained and embroidered. We start with the notion that it is our right—nay, our duty—to intervene in the internal affairs of our neighbors because we thereby create freedom, democracy, and (most important) improved investment opportunities for ourselves that we then imagine benefit the Brazilians apace. In fact, it is only now, after the military dictatorships have long withered away, that under a fully democratic (and mildly socialist) government, Brazil is making rapid economic strides in the world, much more so than is the United States.

  Much more recently, George W. Bush said the United States was going to war with Iraq. Congress said they wanted evidence that Iraq was a threat. The CIA provided the evidence. Congress voted to go to war. My guess is that most Americans now remember the sequence as: The CIA provided evidence that Iraq was a threat. Based on this evidence, Bush and Congress decided to go to war. If so, a false historical narrative was born, another aggressive war turned into a defensive one.

  One cost of US attachment to international intervention and war is the growth of the military-industrial complex famously warned against by President Dwight Eisenhower fifty years ago—or military-industrial-congressional complex, as he first called it. Its appetite seems insatiable; the United States alone now spends almost as much on warfare (“defense”) as the rest of the world put together. Many of the chief US export industries are military as well: fighter jets, helicopters, rifles, bullets. We arm the world at every level, from criminal gangs in our own hemisphere to entire states throughout the world. The collapse of the Soviet system gave only a temporary respite from these forces, and the United States is now spending relatively more than ever. At the same time, an enormous and very expensive intelligence system is being created.

  Note that the Soviets provided a counterweight to rapacious capitalism. With their collapse, the past twenty years have seen intense American wars, an accelerated shift of wealth to the already wealthy (a trend that began a few years earlier), and gross financial thievery by the wealthy and their agents leading to near economic collapse.

  US HISTORY TEXTBOOKS

  A useful part of understanding false historical narratives is seeing what efforts are made to instill them in schools, and we shall try to do this for each of our examples. In the United States, high schools were first required to teach US history around 1900 as part of a nationwide, flag-waving frenzy. Although by logic, one might easily imagine that the function of teaching one’s own history would be to learn and prepare oneself for the future, the nationalistic origin reveals the deeper force that operates in country after country—toward building a positive, patriotic story, one that encourages group cohesion, self-congratulation, and superiority vis-à-vis others, a self-serving false historical narrative available to rationalize every action.

  What we have now in the United States is instructive. Several huge books compete for a very large market. The average weight of each book exceeds six pounds and contains more than one thousand pages. This is partly due to pressure to mention every state and president, every event big and small, thus precluding any study of history’s larger patterns and events. To help the teacher get students to read these bloated books, multiple free teaching aids are offered, crisscrossed with organization. One book has 840 “main ideas within the main text,” 310 “skill builders,” and 466 “critical thinking” questions. No system of human thought is known to produce coherent patterns with so many variables. Students have been described as memorizing material for each chapter, only to forget it to free up neurological space for the next chapter.

  In short, US history is sliced and diced right out of existence. Main themes and topics are easily lost. One book offered little more than a paragraph on all of slavery. Conflict of any kind, or even suspense, tends to be removed. The story is one in which every problem has been solved or is about to be. The present is almost never used to illuminate the past, and we learn nothing from the past that would help us with the future and very few lessons of any kind. Thus, the study of US history has become an exercise in rote memory and self-glorification, with almost no relevant learning. Not surprisingly, students routinely describe history as the most boring subject in school, easily beating English and chemistry, yet interest in history in other contexts, including general books, museums, and films, remains high.

  When I was an undergraduate major in US history at Harvard in the early 1960s, the names of the texts gave away the game: The Genius of American Democracy. You did not need to read the book; the content was right there in the title. The chief problem in American historiography was: Why are we the greatest nation that was ever conceived and the greatest people who ever strode the face of the earth? Competing answers had to do with the value of a receding frontier (a benign metaphor for territorial expansion), of having upper-class Englishmen design the society, of building a country on perpetual immigration, and so on. The key is what was assumed in advance, and of course high school history texts reflect this as well: Triumph of the American Nation, Land of Promise , The Great Republic. Meta-message—you have a proud heritage, certainly nothing to be ashamed of, look at what the United States has accomplished and just imagine what it will soon do. Be a good citizen; be all you can be.

  LARGER VIEW OF US HISTORY

  The pervious sections are not meant to be a representative history of the United States. US history has many virtues, among which is the fact that the US population is reconstituted every generation through a roughly 10 percent admixture by external immigration from throughout the world. Although in its history rules of immigration have favored some groups over others, all have had some opportunity. And with illegal immigration, such opportunities are sometimes greatly enhanced. From a biological standpoint, the resulting outbreeding (insofar as it takes place, as it inevitably must) will tend to be genetically beneficial. The US population is perpetually heterogeneous, about to be infused with 10 percent more genes from around the world. This continual level of in-migration, outbreeding, and cultural diversity is unusual for most countries.

  One other feature of US history is highly unusual and largely positive. Its most costly war to itself—700,000 dead out of a population of about 18 million—was the Civil War, a most ironic war in that one side wished to free slaves to whom they were less related than were the slaves’ owners. The owners cared primarily about maintaining these people as their property (rather than, in some cases, their children), so they fought to maintain this right even though this sometimes harmed their own flesh and blood. In short, the Civil War was fought in great part as a moral crusade to end something that was seen as a moral evil. Loss of life was mostly suffered by European Americans and roughly equally on both sides, those fighting for justice and those against it. The later history of African Americans was in some ways more dreadful than under slavery, since not counting as property they could be hanged or “lynched” by the thousands as a form of social control. Nevertheless, the subpopulation had become strong enough by the middle of the twentieth century to begin a political and social movement that led to eventual legal liberation, and with this yoke lifted, the intrinsic benefits of strong outbreeding associated with strong selection has produced a vibrant and powerful subgroup. African Americans are the melting-pot population par excellence in the United States, genetically roughly 25 percent European in origin, 70 percent African, and the remainder Amerindian and Chinese. At the same time, social policies such as the war on drugs amount to a war on lower-class African Americans, greatl
y increasing incarceration rates, with destructive effects on their communities. So the racist attack continues, but in the long run it can only strengthen the biological power of its target.

  THE REWRITING OF JAPANESE HISTORY

  In the past ten years, Japan has shown a very interesting retrogressive approach to its own past, in which critical events, sometimes formerly acknowledged, are now denied despite massive evidence to the contrary. With each opposing revelation, the denials are then tailored downward but always with the intent of minimizing official complicity in the historical crimes being assessed.

  It is well documented that the Japanese government, mostly via the army, ran a vast, forced system of sexual slavery throughout conquered sections of Asia during World War II in which local women—Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indonesians, and others—were forced, often at the point of a bayonet, to serve the sexual needs of the invading Japanese soldiers (often more than fifty men per day). They were given the euphemism “comfort women.” The matter was well researched immediately after WWII based partly on interrogation of Japanese prisoners in connection with possible war crimes. Dutch investigators described the forcible seizure of Indonesian women, who were beaten, stripped naked, and then forced to sexually service large numbers of Japanese soldiers every day. Their sufferings were vividly described by some of the women themselves who had long hidden the true facts in shame but spoke out in the early 1990s, when the Japanese government initially refused to acknowledge the crime, much less make any amends. And of course this is one of the benefits of denial: the lack of any need for restitution.