Humans: A Brief History of Failure and How We Ruined Everything by Tom Phillips.. On the disruptive power of human beings

Have you ever wondered about the usefulness of our existence in life?

Have you thought about the extent of the destruction caused by man since his existence?

How can we praise ourselves for the reality we have destroyed?

In his book “Humans: A Brief History of Failure and How We Fucked it All Up” Tom Phillips tries to present a different viewpoint from many of the literature and books presented by man throughout his long history, civilization, writers and authors hastened to talk about heroes and their achievements, turning killing and destruction into heroics and victories that poets write about and sing about.

Damn what did we do?

Phillips begins a book, A Brief History of Failure, with this question, to talk within ten chapters that he begins by talking about the reason for the foolishness of thinking in humans, which crystallizes in his arrogance and his amazing ability to modify the facts in proportion to his story that he wants to publish, which begins according to our viewpoint, we humans, from our distinguished ability to thinking apart from the rest of the living creatures, thinking drives us to creativity and achievement, but on the other hand it leads us to failure.

Then our writer continues to talk about the environment in which we live, and about the human struggle to stay within a reality in which he follows the leader, the reality of wars and fighting, a reality in which man either turns into a murderous colonizer, or into a docile and submissive living under the yoke of colonialism, so democracy seems to be just a lie we use to humanize our lives, we convince ourselves that there is hope from the human being, the person who created technology to improve life, but it will be a cause for destroying the future.

When did we start spoiling everything?

Phillips considers that we began to spoil everything from the moment we thought that we were special, and that thinking makes us rise above others, we can invent tools that improve our lives, and make us confront nature, as history puts it. Facing the difficulties of nature was the first reason that prompted man to use thinking he excels in inventing everything that made civilizations consist.

This puts us in front of an important fact, which says: It is our ability to think, which distinguishes us from other creatures, that has often caused our dismal failure. Our attempts to tame nature, and our efforts to reshape the world as we wish, made us commit the most atrocities of killing, destroying, and displacing our people.

On the other hand, it shows that the human tendency to bias his views is very dangerous, because this will push us to do the impossible to prove our views, and this is evident in our political positions. On the contrary, we see him trying to present all the evidence so that his idea is the most correct.

Greed and selfishness are the source of human misfortunes

Our constant desire to obtain things and gains in all its forms leads to us falling into fatal mistakes. In ancient times, man used to hunt in order to get his food, but with time he began to fish only for pleasure, and to show his strength and ability. 

This greed made those who wish to obtain additional gains do everything. The owner of the factory does not care about the waste that is thrown into rivers and seas, the colonizer kills to expand the area of land he owns, and the inventor strives to make a tool that serves man on the one hand, but causes unemployment for thousands of people on the other. The selfishness of the person who desires to be told about, written about, and his glories remembered.

The era of agriculture is the era of unjust division of wealth

Agriculture is that noble act that made man obtain his food security, which led him to have more children to do farming work on the one hand, and under the justification that it is possible to secure their food without fear of famine.

Nevertheless, famines occurred and hunger spread. Man did not initially calculate that agriculture, although positive on the one hand, would cause changes in the nature and composition of the soil, and that nature would not always give rain, as some crops would end, and some of them would be infected with diseases, and man, of course, tried to find solutions to that.

Here, man began to own the real land, and the stronger was able to own a larger land, and his greed for ownership increased until some people started working on the land with their daily food, and some of them obtained the products of the land with ease, so the curse of man increased on his partner in nature.

Domesticating animals is our step to be masters of nature

In The Brief History of Failure, Phillips tells us about Thomas Austen ; The British citizen who decided to settle in Australia in the year 1859 A.D. trying to build a stable rural agricultural life, he transferred a large number of British rabbits to Australia, as an attempt to improve the hunting season and under the pretext that rabbits would not harm the new nature.

Rabbits began to breed, and it is known that they multiply greatly, and this made the ecological balance in the area affected, as rabbits eat everything in front of them and they have no natural enemy in the new area except hunting, which was not enough to reduce their numbers, which led to the impact of crops and water, and the matter did not stop at The story of rabbits, there is a predatory northern viper that was transferred from its original environment to America and others.

As a result, our attempt to be masters of nature made nature itself affected and harmed, and not only nature, we ourselves were subjected to harm and caused ourselves results that we were and still reap the results of daily.

The task of making decisions for one person

Phillips asks: Did wars precede the emergence of individual leadership, or vice versa?

The answer seems clear: it is not important who takes precedence, but what is important is that leadership and wars are two factors that always accompany them, in addition to the violence that must adorn the seizure of power.

In such a reality, wars become our daily bread, and songs of violence become evidence of strength and greatness. The stories of kings and princes and their greatness clearly show what they did, how they reached power, and the types of violence they practiced, yet we find those who call to glorify them, and remind them that they are heroes!

Democracy is the enthusiasm of the simple people

People believe that democracy will give them power, and this pushes them to defend it and try to achieve it, so they are led to exercise dictatorship in order to implement democracy that loses its meaning, and there is no stronger example in history than Hitler's democracy, who turned into the biggest nightmare of dictatorship.

The nightmare of power is enough for a person to reconsider life and say to himself: Damn what have we done? And how we ruined it all.

People love wars

From the beginning, with Cain and Abel, a war arose that led to the death of one of the two brothers, and from that moment until today the wars, whether individual or collective, have not stopped, a series that did not end for reasons, most of which were in search of power and glory, or for trivial reasons that carried in their mind the reality of the desire for control, such as the war of the bucket. In 1325 AD, which erupted between the cities of Modena and Bologna because the soldiers of Modena stole an ancient oaken bucket from the town well in Bologna.

Sometimes colonialism... and sometimes conquests

The dead are scattered everywhere, sometimes they are heroes who defend and die with honor, and sometimes they are criminals, and in both cases they die for ideas that man himself developed and attacked for.

The main problem lies in defining things. Wars are conquests when we sing about glories, and they are abhorrent colonialism when we are on the losing side of the equation, and this is also a policy that changes under the weight of necessities, and the best example of this is what we call today the exploration of Columbus, which history has written about as a great work , forgetting the massacres he committed against the indigenous peoples of those areas he entered.

Scientific development… a curse or a blessing?

Since ancient times, man has tried to develop his life, and in every attempt, he has presented man with great achievements that helped him improve his life in all its fields, but in spite of that, scientists have committed very big mistakes that have affected their lives and the lives of those around them.

The desire of scientists to explore and occupy the lead to commit foolishness that cannot be ignored, here is the scientist Jesse William Lazear, and to leave no room for doubt that yellow fever is an epidemic disease transmitted by mosquitoes, he allowed a mosquito carrying the disease to bite him, causing him to die after he proved his theory.

In the end, we must admit, after all of the above, that man is short-sighted, as Phillips sees. He always forgets that his actions, no matter how great they are, carry terrible results on the other side. He mistakenly believes that his invention will make the world a better place, and perhaps that people will forget what is bad. He did it if he presented some human slogans, and perhaps what Alfred Nobel did, the inventor of dynamite, is the best proof of that, when he considered that his invention would end wars between countries so that they would not get involved in using dynamite, but he was wrong, even the nuclear bomb could not put an end to the wars between States, and what happened in World War II of the bombings of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the best proof of that.

Finally... Everything we said about the summary of the history of failure remains a point of view that expresses the fears that man builds as a result of everything that is happening in our contemporary world, and perhaps these fears are useful so that man does not deafen his ears about facts that may lead to the destruction of the future, and perhaps we learn from our history, so that we do not fall.

What do you think?