Hollywood plays an important role in shaping our perception of our place in society. Movies may also define our expectations about the day-to-day connections we have with other people. Whether it’s about love, enmity, compassion, or greed, human interaction in movies directly influences our ideas of how relationships work in real life.

10 Movies Based On Common Misconceptions

Unfortunately, Hollywood still gets a lot of things wrong about society. In theory, that should be fine because the goal of many movies is to portray the world as we want it to be—not as it really is. These inaccuracies become a problem, though, when they lead to ignorance about certain issues in real life.

10 War Is a Glorious Affair

War is one subject that filmmakers have a social responsibility to portray accurately. Yet, they still refuse to get right. As quite a few critics have pointed out, the depiction of war in popular cinema remains inaccurate at best and intentionally skewed to influence the public’s mood at worst.

It can be argued that public perception affects our cinema and popular fiction and not the other way around. If that’s true, then cinema’s job is to show the world as it should be, not as it is.

War is a misunderstood affair even in movies that make a genuine effort to show conflict like it is in real life. According to some critics, a true anti-war movie is quite difficult to make. Even if you try to show aspects like the brotherhood between soldiers and excessive violence, the film unintentionally promotes the whole act.

Dennis Rothermel, a retired professor of philosophy, argues that a movie can only give us an accurate representation of real-life conflicts if it has “random infliction of violent death, abject terror, [and] heinousness as a norm of behavior.”^[1]

That doesn’t mean that movies never get it right. Some popular works—like Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, and Paths of Glory—definitely stand out when it comes to realistic portrayals of the horrors of war. If film directors and writers were a bit more diligent about the depictions of war on the big screen, popular support for wars around the world probably wouldn’t be as high as it is.

9 People Have Too Much Money

There are good and bad economic cycles. However, even when the world has rising rents and stagnating wages, it seems that Hollywood simply has no idea of how things really are. Characters in TV shows and movies usually have a lot of free time to drive the plot, all the while doing underpaid creative jobs.

Just look at Friends, the story of six young residents of New York who do almost nothing all day and can still afford rent in relatively huge apartments in posh parts of New York.^[2] Of course, it’s technically a TV show and not a movie. However, the big screen is full of unrealistically rich characters, too.

8 No Matter What Happens, the Hero Gets the Girl in the End

A lot has been said about inaccurate portrayals of women in movies, though that’s an obvious consequence of writing rooms being traditionally male-dominated spaces. Although things are rapidly changing—thanks to a deluge of women now going for writing careers in film and television—we’re still a long way from Hollywood correctly portraying women as the normal, three-dimensional people that they are.

One of the most damaging examples is when movies perpetuate the notion that the guy would obviously end up with the girl at the conclusion of the story. Most movies adhere to this cliche regardless of how separated it is from real life.

It doesn’t matter if the woman has a completely different life before she meets the hero or if they have no reason to be attracted to each other. By the time the movie ends, circumstances will make them come together and live happily ever after.^[3]

Apart from promoting the faulty belief that you’re entitled to a romantic partner just because you did your job well, it causes even deeper problems in society. As protagonists of the opposite sex almost always end up getting together, it promotes the idea that most male-female relationships are romantic in nature. As anyone who has stepped out of the house can tell you, that’s not really the case.

A realistic movie would end with the lead actor and actress solving the big problem and returning to a friendship in which they only get to see each other once a month due to work and family.

7 Parents Are Just Bad at Their Jobs

There’s no dearth of intentionally bad parents in Hollywood, though we’re not here to talk about them. In movies, it seems like parents are generally bad at their jobs. You’ll first notice it when you see a kid in a movie sneak out of the house to go party at night. Then you start seeing it in every movie.

If movie parents were anything like real parents, many movies would cease to have a plotline. Kids in movies carry out entire adventures without their parents ever knowing about it.

Unfortunately for all the youngsters out there, parents in real life are quite adept at stopping their kids from doing what movie kids do. The most effective way parents do it is by controlling the money supply. Pocket money is often intentionally calculated to stop kids from sneaking out and partying at night or partaking in any other calls to adventure.^[4]

Real parents usually know what their kids are up to at any given point. There are very few cases where a group of bright school friends solves a major world problem without their parents knowing about it.

6 Parties Are Always Fun

Every time people get together to celebrate something in the movies, it’s all fun and games. Rarely does anything go wrong or anyone get bored. Almost every college party is awesome and eventful.^[5] If it isn’t, that’s an important part of the plot. Bad parties have their own role to play in advancing plotlines.

As you know, that’s not the case in real life. Most college parties are boring affairs and usually don’t end in something scandalous. Of course, good parties exist, though they’re usually the exception. Most of the time, parties are simply a bunch of tired, overworked people sipping on wine and talking until 11:00 PM, after which they promptly go back home and sleep.

5 Villains Are Ugly; Heroes Are Attractive

We know that life is a bit easier for individuals at the top of the attractiveness pyramid. Your service at restaurants is faster, your interviews are easier, and people willingly let you skip queues all the time. Being attractive also increases your chances of survival, even though good looks don’t have any inherent survival benefits.

A big part of that could be attributed to our popular fiction, especially the movies. Villains are usually portrayed as ugly, in clear contrast to conventionally attractive lead actors and actresses.

Although we understand that it’s necessary to create that much-needed binary of good and evil, being ugly isn’t necessarily bad in the real world. In fact, being less attractive than someone else has absolutely zero effect on your skills, day-to-day abilities, or intelligence. That’s not to say that all movie villains are ugly, but attractive ones are usually antiheroes or relatable villains.^[6]

To see how it works in the real world, just look at how attractive criminals—like Ted Bundy— can get away with their crimes for so long. Or how well-dressed, polite politicians who are actively working against the people keep getting reelected.

4 Killing the Villain Ends the Problem

With few exceptions, it’s usually quite easy to tell the good guys from the bad ones in movies. Villains and heroes are clearly defined, appealing to our innate desire to see the world in simple, black-and-white terms.

Of course, that’s not how it is in real life. No one in history—other than Hitler, of course—was completely good or bad. Accurate portrayals are rarely successful, though, as people really do want to see a hero beating a villain at the end. Other than forcibly putting history into neat boxes that we can clearly oppose or support, this also promotes the perception that complex, entrenched problems can be eliminated by killing the villainous leader.

Movies usually end with the bad guys dying and things going back to normal. They ignore the fact that the underlying problems created by those villains still exist.

Take Harry Potter. Sure, by the end of the series, he has killed Voldemort and dispersed his army. While it solves the immediate problem, it doesn’t do anything about the wave of racial supremacy that Voldemort has already unleashed on the magical world.

Lord of the Rings ends with the destruction of Sauron, but he wasn’t the only inhabitant of Mordor. The Orcs could revolt and continue the war in the aftermath of the movies.

We see this in real life, too. Killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end Islamic terrorism. ISIS improved upon al-Qaeda’s methods to create an even more radical form of terrorism, and it could happen again. Of course, Al-Qaeda itself remains a potent force in quite a few countries.^[7]

Killing Hitler may have ended the immediate threat from the Nazis. However, he was just a figurehead for various racial supremacist movements that were popular around the world at that time—movements that are still alive and kicking to this day.

Associating wider problems with one easily dismissible villain also lets us absolve our involvement in the relevant issues. It’s easy for the people of Gotham to root for Batman over the Joker because it distracts them from the fact that they’re equally responsible for the socioeconomic conditions that give rise to criminals like the Joker in the first place.

3 People Have No Work, and Their Bosses Are Great

We’re not sure if Hollywood execs just don’t know how things are on the ground, but people in movies don’t seem to have the same amount of work as we do. Lunch breaks can be unrealistically long and full of exciting, drawn-out events. In fact, it seems like everyone is allowed to leave at 5:00 PM.

If you work in any competitive, modern office, the chances are that you work long hours multiple times a week with little to no time to indulge in dramatic character arcs. It’s hard to execute intricate love plots involving multiple people across the city if you’re a fresher and have to do three jobs six days a week just to make the rent.

In a similar vein, bosses in movies are surprisingly lenient. Have you ever seen a character at work who faces an emergency and asks a coworker to cover for him while he deals with it? Yeah, that doesn’t happen in real life as you can’t take over someone’s job as a personal favor in real life.^[8]

2 No One Ever Finishes Their Meals

For most people, meals in movies are perfectly normal affairs. Eating morsels of food is mostly a background activity and something that’s only added as a prop to the overall setting.

When you think about it, people in movies should be terribly malnourished. If you notice characters eating anything in a movie, they seem to have a fundamental problem finishing it. How many times have you seen a character prepare a whole breakfast only to watch her kid, husband, or other side character take a bite of it and leave?^[9]

We’re guessing a lot because it happens in many movies.

We don’t have to tell you why this is inaccurate as people usually finish their meals in real life. It’s one of the more harmless misconceptions from Hollywood as it hardly affects real-life situations. But it would still be rude to leave a meal midway in most social settings.

1 Creepy Behavior Is Actually Love

Although most of us love a classic rom-com, it only takes rewatching one of them to realize that Hollywood has normalized stalking.

From the famous jukebox scene in Say Anything to the borderline harassment of sending one letter every day to someone in The Notebook, Hollywood regularly portrays as acceptable the types of behavior that would put you behind bars in real life. The Onion even satirized it in one of their classics from 1999 titled “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested.”

That’s not just satire, either. Stalking is a real crime around the world. Just take the United States, whereas many as 7.5 million people endure some form of stalking every year.

While we won’t assume that all cases have the same motivations, enough stories exist about crazy exes and jaded lovers to prove that it’s a real problem. Although we understand that many factors may contribute to stalking, the movies are definitely not helping.^[10]

About The Author: You can check out Himanshu’s stuff at Cracked and Screen Rant or get in touch with him for writing gigs.

Humans have always had a close relationship with alcohol, and the United States even has a holiday commemorating the repeal of Prohibition. Alcohol shaped our history, our culture, and our biology—sometimes in pretty surprising ways.

10We Evolved To Drink

In our bodies today, an enzyme called ADH4 processes whatever alcohol we consume. Other primates have the enzyme, but it acts differently in many of them—and many of them can’t process alcohol like we can.

Chemist Steven Benner, recreating enzymes present in our earliest ancestors, noted different types of ADH4 along our evolutionary tree. He traced our version back to a split in the tree 10 million years ago, when the gorilla and the ancestors of the chimpanzee branched off from other primates like lemurs and the orangutan. One branch—that we’re still on—developed the ability to process alcohol. Our group of primates spent more time on the ground eating fallen fruit that had begun to ferment, as opposed to picking fruit fresh from where it grew.

Though there’s still no concrete fossil evidence from our last common ancestor with the gorilla, we know one thing about them: They had the first awesome holiday parties.

9The Face Of World Politics

Every politician makes promises. It’s in their job description. But in the good old days, they offered something more concrete: Candidates handed out alcohol in return for votes.

The practice dates back to ancient Greece and Rome, and it’s been recorded throughout Europe’s history as well. It then stayed around longer than you might think. George Washington’s first attempt at running for office (in the Virginia House of Burgesses) was a failure; on his next attempt, he won, after giving out about half a gallon of alcohol for each vote. A century later, the Republican Party elevated the idea, treating 50,000 of Brooklyn’s citizens to an alcohol-laden picnic.

Some attempts failed, however, leading to important life lessons for 19th-century politicians. Stephen Douglas learned the hard way that if you’re expecting 20,000–30,000 people to show up for your party, make sure you have enough booze to go around. After the food and alcohol ran low at his New York bash, the whole thing turned into a massive pushing and shoving match. Voters went away still hungry and thirsty, and when they went to the polls, they voted instead for some man named Abraham Lincoln.

8The Booming Cork Business

Besides brewing and distilling, the alcohol industry is responsible for another business worth $2 billion—cork production.

High-quality cork is needed to preserve the taste and quality of wine. Cork bark needs to be a certain thickness to be effective, but global warming is changing the trees responsible for the material. Cork is now thinner and of lower quality because trees lack vital proteins.

Wine enthusiasts are up in arms about the need for better-quality corks. They’re starting to look toward metal screw caps or rubber stoppers instead, leaving the fate of the cork industry up in the air.

7American Rum And The Revolution

Schools teach us that the colonists living in America rebelled because of unfair taxation, which is a pretty accurate statement. They also teach that a tax on tea fired the colonists up, culminating in 1773’s Boston Tea Party. In reality, it didn’t all start there. First came a tax on molasses—molasses used for making rum.

Rum was a hugely popular drink in the American colonies, with hundreds of distilleries all manufacturing their syrupy version of the Caribbean drink. As North America’s climate was ill-suited for growing sugar, most of it was imported, to the tune of about six million gallons of molasses in 1770.

Molasses and sugar came from British- and French-ruled areas. To secure trade for themselves, the British used the Molasses Act of 1733 to slap a heavy tax on molasses that didn’t come from their own colonies. A revised act in 1764 imposed the tax on both sugar and molasses, allowing for the seizure of any cargo imported in violation of the law.

Suddenly, tax was having a very real impact on the success of a major colonial business, leading to the beginning of the rebellion against the idea of taxation without representation.

6Pasteurization And Alcohol

When Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization, he wasn’t trying to make safer milk. He was trying to solve the problems of local wineries, distilleries, and breweries.

Pasteur was a chemistry professor and the Dean of the Faculte de Sciencies in France. His work in bacteria and fermentation started when a local man approached him about problems with his beet sugar distillery. Sometimes, his product came out fine. Other times, it produced sour lactic acid.

Examining the processes, Pasteur determined the product was being contaminated by germs in the air. For the first time, he proved that a living thing—bacteria—caused the reaction. He responded by introducing processes for heating, boiling, and creating pure yeast cultures. This not only revolutionized wine and beer but made many other foods safer to eat.

5Christianity And Alcohol

The New Testament is pretty explicit about approving of alcohol. Jesus and the Apostles all drank wine, and according to St. Paul, wine is a gift from God. Paul also said that wine should be enjoyed but not abused, and abstinence is better than alcoholism.

While it seems like that should end all disputes on the matter, some Christians argue that the wine of the New Testament is actually non-alcoholic grape juice. They argue this even though the same Hebrew words describe Christ’s wine and the wine that got Noah drunk and naked.

One of the first things the Puritans did in the New World was build some breweries, but some Baptist and Methodist groups call drinking and alcohol evil. Abstaining from alcohol is a big consideration in the Mormon belief system. Other groups, like the Evangelicals, have recently begun lifting bans on the consumption of alcohol in some of their schools—by instructors, anyway.

4The Ancient Drinking Age Debate

In ancient Egypt, from around 4000 B.C., writings reminded mothers to include a healthy serving of beer when sending children off to school. The idea that we needed to keep alcohol from younger generation started later, with Plato.

In his Laws, written about 360 B.C., Plato described a soul having tasted alcohol as being made of fire and iron. Anyone younger than 18 wasn’t ready for the responsibility that needed to go along with enjoying this most godly of pleasures. He also outlined guidelines for how much you should drink. Once you were 18, you could certainly drink, but it was also important that you didn’t drink too much. By the time you were 40, however, you were free to honor Dionysus above all other gods. Alcohol would help you forget sorrow, renew youth, and soften the hard edges that came with age.

Plato also went a step further in his Republic, saying that young men needed to be coached on how to drink properly. They should be trained at formal dinners about how to behave while drinking and what their limits were.

3The Tavern Guided America’s Political Landscape

When taverns were first built in American colonial cities, people from all walks of life went there to drink and compare notes. As America grew and the class division became more evident, divisions in tavern culture followed suit. In taverns such as Boston’s Green Dragon, plans were hatched to form this entirely new nation. By this time, taverns were a male-dominated world, so a lot of decisions happened without a female voice.

Taverns were also divided ethnically. There were Irish pubs, there were German taverns, and other drinking establishments catered to other particular immigrant groups. That meant taverns and pubs were highly visible targets when someone wanted to make a statement against a particular group. In the 1850s, cities closed taverns on Sundays, effectively eliminating the only public meeting house that the immigrant community had on their one day off. Law enforcement would often use taverns to send messages, shutting down establishments frequented by one group or another.

2The Start Of The Gay Rights Movement

Taverns and bars are meeting places even today. In the late 1960s, though, the drinking culture of America looked pretty different. In New York State, places that served a gay clientele were often denied permits to sell alcohol. Most of these taverns and bars kept operating, though, many striking deals with law enforcement to keep their doors open.

On June 27, 1969, police raided one such tavern, the Stonewall Inn. They arrested 13 people. Over the course of the next six days, protesters took to the streets. Other gay clubs had already been closed, and the attack on the Stonewall was the last straw. Stonewall was more than just a bar: It was a place where young people with no family (usually kicked out by parents in denial over having a gay child) could go to be accepted. The attack on the Stonewall was viewed as an attack on the community.

In time, riot squads were dispatched to deal with the crowds, which numbered in the thousands. On the heels of the Stonewall Inn’s arrests came the formation of the LGBT rights groups, as well as the first gay pride parade—held a year after the bar’s clientele faced off with police.

1No Alcohol? No Utopia.

In 1732, the American colonies contained English land to the north, Spanish-held Florida, and a gap between their borders. Wanting to develop something of a buffer between the two, King George agreed to a rather forward-thinking plan put forward by General James Ogelthorpe.

Oglethorpe asked the king to release many poor English citizens languishing in debtors’ prison. He would take them to the New World, giving them a chance at a new life in his Province of Georgia. Along the way, Oglethorpe was determined to avoid the mistakes he saw the colonies making. In his utopian paradise, there would be no handful of wealthy landowners. Instead, the land would be divided equally among the settlers (50 acres each), and selling it was forbidden. Slavery was forbidden, too. He wanted a state where everyone was equal.

He also banned alcohol. Many in debtors’ prison had gotten there because of alcohol.

The buffer zone succeeded in keeping the Spanish from expanding northward, but that was its only success. The 2,800 people who settled in the area imported slaves from farms to the North. They ignored—or ranted about—the land they had been given. They grew angry that the promises of a flourishing silk industry failed. And they really, really didn’t like the idea of the alcohol ban. Settlers drank openly, and Oglethorpe soon found that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

His grand plan for a utopian society of self-sustaining equality collapsed on itself, and England revoked their relative independence in 1752. We like to think that everyone had a drink when they found out.

Every empire falls. There’s no way to stop it. The only we thing can control is how it happens—whether it’ll be a quiet, dignified passing of a torch or the flaming destruction of a nation torn down by barbarians.

SEE ALSO: 10 Truly Disgusting Facts About Ancient Roman Life

That’s more or less what happened to Rome, and the aftermath was pure chaos. The fall of their empire sent the European world spiraling into a dark age that took centuries to escape.

If we take them time to learn from their history, we’ll see some eerie parallels with our own. And if history really does repeat itself, we’ll get a pretty good idea of what’s to come next.

10 Oversea Slave Laborers Won’t Make Your Goods Forever

At its peak, money was rushing into the Roman Empire. The emperors and the government were basking in an absolute avalanche of wealth that helped them control the better part of the known world. But just because the nations had money didn’t mean the Roman people were getting rich.

Instead of hiring their own people, the Romans got foreign slaves to do most of their work. A massive part of their production was being done by foreign slaves, which left the actual citizens with nothing to do. A lot of Romans were unemployed, relying on government subsidies and handouts just to survive.^[1]

Modern companies can’t get away with literally hiring slaves these days, but they can come pretty close. Like Rome, the modern Western countries outsource the vast majority of the things they buy to sweatshops that sometimes pay as little as 64 cents an hour.

Approximately 60 percent of the things Americans buy are made overseas, but it’s not just the US that does this. China currently makes about 50 percent of the world’s clothes and 70 percent of its mobile phones.

The real lesson from Rome, though, is what might happen next—because Rome’s setup didn’t last forever. The slaves started to demand more and revolted. Meanwhile, the people of Rome, influenced by Christian morality, started feeling bad about using slaves.

Their labor system started to collapse. Since slave labor was the backbone of their entire economy, everything else went down with it.

9 Obesity Epidemics Don’t Get A Lot Of Sympathy

The average Roman probably wasn’t obese. A lot of Roman civilians struggled just to get food, but the emperors were a different story.

The rich of Rome spent so much time having feasts and orgies that it actually became common practice to throw up mid-meal to keep it going. After watching Emperor Nero and his friends have a feast, the philosopher Seneca wrote that the wealthy of Rome “vomit that they may eat; and eat that they may vomit.”

But it wasn’t just Nero. Julius Caesar once escaped an assassination attempt because he’d stepped out to vomit up his meal. Emperor Vitellius had a reputation for starting the day by belching his breakfast in the faces of his soldiers.^[2]

In the modern world, poor people in wealthy countries usually become obese—especially in the American South. In some states, type 2 diabetes rates are twice as high as they were 20 years ago. In fact, one-third of the population is obese now.

The real lesson from Rome, though, is that having too much turns people against you. The reason these stories about lascivious Roman emperors have been passed on for so long is because their people wanted to make them look bad. One group of people was gorging themselves while another starved. All that was won by the wealthy was resentment, wars, and a lot of health problems.

8 The Nouveau Riche Never Remember Where They Came From

When Rome was a republic, one of its biggest internal problems was the fight between the patricians and the plebeians. The patricians were aristocrats who got their status by birth, while the plebeians were the common people who had no way of making a better life at the time.

Like our modern societies, the plebeians fought for the right to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They won equal rights, got the opportunity to play a role in Roman politics, and had the chance to make it rich. They helped each other get wealthy, voted their fellow plebeians into power, and then sat back and waited for their friends to make a new utopia of equality.

It didn’t pan out. The newly rich plebeians didn’t do much to help out their old friends.^[3] They just splurged with all their money and enjoyed life as rich people. The plebeians didn’t realize that right away, though.

For a while, things were actually better and they thought their new government was working. But it turned out to be an economic boom brought on by a war. When the nation dipped back into a recession, they were poorer than ever.

The poor stayed poor, the rich stayed rich, and the rare few who broke the mold didn’t do a thing to help out their fellow man.

7 People Who Are In Debt Can Be Controlled

After Rome was sacked by the Gauls, the republic had to funnel a fortune into defense. Taxes went up, the poor went bankrupt, and the people of Rome were soon overwhelmed with so much debt that they couldn’t see any way out of it.

It’s something that ought to sound familiar to a lot of us. For example, the average American leaves college with more than $37,000 in debt from student loans alone, and that’s not even the worse case. In Australia, Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands, and Denmark, the average person’s debt is more than twice their annual income. In fact, the average Australian owes $250,000.^[4]

Like a lot of us today, the plebeians of Rome lobbied their government for debt forgiveness. And the government listened. Now that the lower classes were politically equal, the politicians started pandering to them. Populist leaders promised “bread and circuses”—in other words, entertainment, food, and debt relief.

The plebeians were so desperate to feed their families that they didn’t care what a politician did as long as he canceled their debt. So they started voting for populist leaders like Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus. Since the bread and circuses kept coming, the plebeians didn’t get too worried when the elections stopped.

6 Printing Money Isn’t A Good Way To Save The Economy

A Chinese official once warned the US that its national debt was getting out of control. America, the official complained, was selling too many Treasury bonds. It was increasing the national debt in a way that could collapse the entire economy. America wasn’t just selling bonds. In the official’s words, the country was “printing money.”^[5]

That’s a move that ruined Rome. As the empire got bigger and its expenses got higher, Emperor Nero came up with the bright idea of using less silver in Roman coins. That way, he could print more money. And if Nero could print more money, he figured that he would have enough to make that Scrooge McDuck money pool he’d been dreaming of.

The idea didn’t ruin everything overnight. But Nero’s successors copied him, and of course, inflation went wild. Over the next 200 years, the price of wheat increased 200-fold and Roman coins became almost completely worthless.

Whether America is really “printing money” is up for debate. But they’re definitely putting off money problems for later. Despite having the highest GDP in the world, the US also has the highest debt in the world. They owe a staggering $18 trillion dollars, a lot of which comes from Treasury bonds.

The country in second place for “most debt” is the European Union. That’s right—the entire European Union, which is 28 countries combined, has less debt than the United States has on its own.

5 Don’t Underestimate The Barbarians

Rome managed to stand its ground against massive empires. The Romans fought against Greece and Egypt and won. The greatest and most advanced societies fell at their feet, but Rome still got crushed—by barbarians.

Everything started to go wrong when Attila the Hun rampaged through the Western Roman Empire. To the Romans, this was a primitive culture. One Roman wrote that the Huns were “so little advanced in civilization that they [made] no use of fire, nor any kind of relish, in the preparation of their food.” To the Romans, this was like a battle against cavemen.^[6]

It was a little like the modern war on terrorism. On one side was the most advanced and powerful country in the world, and on the other was a group of vicious men who didn’t care if they lived or died.

The Romans lost. Attila demanded half their empire. When they refused, he rampaged through their country, stealing their siege weapons and advanced technology as he went. By the end, the Romans had to meet all his demands. From then on, they were regularly paying the Huns massive tributes just to beg the Huns not to finish Rome off.

4 Definitely Don’t Train The Barbarians In Advanced Warfare

Attila the Hun didn’t make it to Rome, but the Visigoths did. The Visigoth leader Alaric managed to lead a horde of barbarian warriors all the way to the Roman capital, take everything they had, and call himself merciful for letting them keep their lives. The Roman army was powerless to stop the barbarian hordes because, for the most part, the Roman army was the barbarian hordes.

Alaric and the men who sacked Rome were armed and trained by the Romans. Years ago, Rome started hiring Visigoths and Gauls to fill up their legions. Eventually, there were so many barbarians in the Roman army that the Roman people just called their army “the barbarians” to save time.^[7]

During the Soviet-Afghan War, the US Army called Islamic fighters from around the Middle East to come to Afghanistan so the Americans could arm and train these Islamic fighters. Just as Rome trained Alaric and the Visigoths and gave them siege weapons, the US trained Osama bin Laden and the Taliban and gave them Stinger missiles.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that it turned out the same way.

3 Big Military Budgets Bankrupt Big Countries

The problem with being the world’s superpower is that it makes you the world’s biggest target. That’s something Rome learned. As they got bigger, their threats got bigger and they had to pour everything they had into the army.

It’s something that America has learned, too. Even though military spending has skyrocketed since September 11, 2001, America isn’t safe. Today, Americans funnel $598.5 billion per year into their military. To put that in perspective, more than one-third of the whole world’s military spending is done by the US.^[8]

The Romans dealt with their ever-growing army by cranking up the taxes. But it didn’t really make things better. With massive taxes weighing down the people, unemployment and poverty ran rampant.

The people started rioting in the streets against the government. For a lot of Romans, it became hard to understand what made living in Rome worth giving up everything to defend it?

2 Watch Out For Rising Eastern Empires

Perhaps the biggest threat wasn’t the people who were trying to burn Rome to the ground. In a way, the most dangerous problem may have been the people who were letting Rome be: Parthia, the Eastern empire than the Romans could never defeat.

Early on, the Romans and the Parthians tried to destroy each other but they couldn’t pull it off.^[9] The two nations were too powerful, and it just wasn’t worth it. So, in the end, they called for a peace treaty and agreed to leave side by side in relative peace.

They entered a weird relationship as trade partners that didn’t trust each other and that tried to beat each other in every deal—a little like the United States and modern China. And that ended up changing everything.

When a peaceful Han Chinese diplomat tried to reach Rome, the Parthians stopped him and turned him away. The diplomat found out that the Parthians had been deliberately keeping the two nations apart so that they could control Roman trade.

If he’d made it through, though, Rome might have had an ally and an insight into the Huns before Attila invaded. And everything could have changed.

1 The Fall Of An Empire Doesn’t Happen Overnight

Rome didn’t collapse in a pile of fire and ashes. Just getting sacked by barbarians didn’t spell the end of Rome. It died out peacefully over hundreds of years from dozens of decisions that probably seemed like great ideas at the time.

As the different parts of Rome started feuding over religious changes and economic problems, it got split up into parts a few times before it officially became two different empires in AD 364. A little over 100 years later, the Western empire completely fell to the hands of the barbarians and the lines of Europe started looking like crude early versions of a modern map.^[10]

Even that, though, wasn’t the real end of Rome. The Eastern empire, now known as the Byzantine Empire, lived on for more than 1,000 years after the split. As the Byzantine Empire, Rome survived the Sasanian War, the Muslim conquests, and even the Crusades before they were finally absorbed by the Ottoman Empire.

It took 1,000 years, though, for Rome to die. It wasn’t over the second they stopped being the world’s biggest superpower. They lingered on for centuries. Their quality of life slowly changed, and most of their people were probably unaware that they were living through the fall of an empire.

Odds are, the same thing will happen to us. We won’t go out in a big explosion. We’ll just slowly start fighting wars we can’t win and struggling with an economy we can’t handle. And slowly, we’ll become nothing more than a chapter in a history book.

The world is full of things that people don’t like. That could be other people, ideas, art, food, and even facts. If something exists, you better believe somebody hates it. If enough people get together to dislike something, an entire society can shun that thing and it becomes taboo. Throughout history, there have been a lot of taboos — cannibalism comes to mind — and mostly we can get behind these things. But every once in a while something pops up that’s a little harder to justify for its taboo status. 

10. Bananas Were Once Considered Immoral

There is a far greater than 0% chance that you or someone you know has picked up a banana in your presence and made a joke about the shape of it. It may be juvenile, it may be uncreative, but it’s also what are the oldest and most reliable jokes in the fruit world. 

While everybody understands the idea behind making a phallic banana joke, less well-known is that people took this stuff seriously once upon a time and bananas were actually considered pretty immoral.

You can thank colonialism for this one, as when Europeans first discovered bananas in the 1800s they devoted time to explaining how to disguise the shape of a banana to not offend anyone. As delicious as a banana is, no self-respecting British citizen wanted to be caught nibbling the tip of one, lest their reputation be sullied.

This was all very intentional, of course. It’s not like the modern world invented the idea of a penis joke by any means. Silent films of the ’20s used bananas as a very explicit metaphor, and polite society clearly knew the implications of the nefarious fruit for years. 

9. Green Hats are Taboo in China

Some taboos are very much a cultural thing, and the meaning behind them really doesn’t extend well beyond borders. For instance, look at a green hat. On St Patrick’s Day, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a bar anywhere in the Western Hemisphere that isn’t full of people in green hats drunkenly embracing Irish heritage whether or not they have it. Head East and things will change significantly.

In China, you never want to wear a green hat. Wearing a green hat means you are being cheated on according to Chinese superstition. You’d think that if no one ever wore a green hat, then fidelity would be the standard for all of society, but that’s not exactly how this superstition works.

In Chinese, a man whose wife cheats on him is called “dai lu mao.” If you translate the traditional Chinese you get the word “cuckold” which makes sense but then there’s the literal translation of the Chinese characters which is “wearing a green hat.” The idea is so taboo that if you’re caught committing a traffic violation, police may make you wear a green hat in public to shame you so that you don’t do it again. 

There’s apparently a link between this and the Yuan dynasty when it was said that the relatives of prostitutes were forced to wear green hats. Whatever the potential validity or history of the idea, that’s why green hats are not in fashion today. 

8. Men’s Shorts Were Once Considered Offensive in America

Have you ever seen a man wearing shorts in the summer and they were just too short for your liking and you thought “No, this doesn’t seem right?” You are not alone. Once upon a time, men wearing shorts in America was an altogether taboo act.

Even in the modern era, shorts are not welcome everywhere. There are stories about boys at school and even adult men in workplaces being sent home to change because they wore shorts.

Shorts on men were considered improper and immodest. The town of Honesdale Pennsylvania banned wearing shorts in 1938 by pointing out that the town is not a bathing beach.  Even as late as 1959, a town in New York banned shorts for anyone over the age of 16. Shorts were strictly meant for children who apparently didn’t know any better, and could look foolish in the eyes of adults. If you were caught wearing shorts, you could get up to 25 days in jail. 

7. The Scottish are Said to Have a Historical Aversion to Pork

If you’re not from the UK, you may not have a very clear idea of Scottish cuisine. Everyone knows haggis, but what else? While you can Google the topic and learn about what the good folks of the Highlands might enjoy eating, you may notice a lack of pork on the menu. That’s not to say there’s no pork in Scotland, but you’ll find it’s not nearly as widespread as other meats. This is thanks to a historical aversion to pork with some hard to pin down roots in Scottish culture.

Scots not eating pork has a pretty long history. In 1920 it was proposed that this anti-pork stance goes all the way back to pre-Roman times. While the rest of Europe was happy to enjoy pork chops, Scots tried to stay away from it. Books from the 1800s referenced it and James VI of Scotland was known to hate pork as far back as his reign in the 1500s.

Some of this taboo seems to be rooted in superstition. With pigs not being native to Scotland, and the animal being so rare, there are accounts of people seeing them for the first time and thinking that they were demons. Others believed pigs caused diseases like cancer and leprosy. 

While many other theories have been presented as to why pigs and the Scottish don’t seem to get along, the easiest conclusion to draw is that no one knows why pork is not traditionally something eaten in Scotland.

6. The First Man to Use an Umbrella in England was Shamed

New technology often comes with resistance. Sometimes you’re mocked for using something new and everyone gets on board and agrees. Things like the Segway scooter, for instance. Those never became cool, and we’re all the better for it. But what about something a little simpler like the umbrella?

The first man to use an umbrella in England was Jonas Hanway and people made fun of him mercilessly. It wasn’t that no one knew what an umbrella was it was just that they all thought umbrellas were garbage. Only a truly effeminate man would ever walk around with an umbrella, a symbol of everything wrong and weak in the world. They really hated umbrellas back then.

Umbrellas were considered tools of Frenchmen, and no one wanted to be mistaken for a Frenchman in England. Basically, it was something womanly and pathetic according to the standards of the day. History proved the desire not to get soaking wet as something more important.

5. Many Early Cultures Had a Taboo Against Naming Bears Directly

Are you afraid of bears? Maybe in a general sense, you’re not because you don’t ever run across bears in your day-to-day life, but if you did run into a bear it’s entirely reasonable that you would be afraid of it, right? They’re typically apex predators where they live, and toe to toe against a human, a bear is going to win every time. They’re so frightening, in fact, that the name of a bear is taboo.

Now you may be thinking that the name of a bear isn’t taboo because it’s right there, bear. It looks like the word bear was actually devised to come up with a way to refer to the animal without using its real name like it was a big furry Voldemort.

The English “bear,” the Dutch “beer,” the German “baer,” the Swedish “bjorn” and a lot of other words for bear can all be traced to the same proto-Indo-European origin – “*bher” or brown. The name means “brown one” and it was what people called bears rather than calling them by their true name, another proto-Indo-European word *rkto. These words are spelled with an asterisk in front of them to indicate linguists are sort of just guessing.

It’s been hypothesized that in many of the early cultures where bears were common, the taboo against calling them by name came about because they were so terrifying, it was best to only talk about them in a roundabout way, like calling them the brown one, instead of naming them directly. 

4. Many Marines Consider Apricots Taboo

The Marines are known for being some of the toughest soldiers in the armed forces. But that doesn’t mean they’re above falling prey to superstition. For instance, Marines and apricots don’t get along. The taboo against them dates back to World War II.

Like all soldiers, Marines are issued rations when in the field. Included in those rations were apricots. They’re lightweight, don’t take up a lot of room, and offer some quick nutrients. Now here’s where things get a little sketchy. If a tank ever broke down, there would be apricots on board. That’s kind of obvious if they’re part of your rations, but soldiers are a superstitious bunch at the best of times. The more tanks broke down over time, for whatever reason, the more people noticed there were apricots on board. Eventually, they started blaming apricots for the tanks breaking down.

Later, in Vietnam, this morphed into something even worse. If someone ate apricots, it was believed it was going to attract enemy artillery fire. Many retired Marines swore off apricots for the rest of their lives.

3. Kissing In Public Was and Sometimes Still Is Taboo

If you’re not a fan of PDA then take heart, a lot of history agrees with you. Kissing in public has been a taboo at many times and in many places and, in fact, still is in some places. 

Historically, public kissing was often done only between men, as in a subject kissing the hand of his Lord or even a platonic kiss in greeting like you might still see in parts of Europe. Unmarried women were usually not invited to the kissing parties and even if you were married your only public kiss might be the one on your wedding day.

In countries like China and Japan, public kissing was long considered a taboo practice and is only becoming accepted more recently. Countries like India and Thailand still typically shy away from any public affection.

2. Christmas Was Once Taboo in New England

For at least a decade now, every year at Christmas, the media will focus on the so-called War on Christmas. This is all very ironic since, once upon a time, Christmas was unwelcome in certain parts of America. Especially in New England.

In the 1600s, Puritan settlers in New England enacted laws banning Christmas and punishing those who might celebrate it. In the Massachusetts Bay Colony, anyone who celebrated between 1659 and 1681 was fined. Their beef? It focused too heavily on pagan traditions.

The taboo on Christmas remained in various places throughout New England all the way until 1870 when it was declared a federal holiday, thus making it hard to get away from or be punished for on the local level. 

1. The “Euphemism Treadmill” Refers to the Habit of Coming Up with New Polite Terms for “Taboo” Words

Language taboos are some of the most common taboos we have in the modern world. Some words are so taboo we won’t even say them when discussing them, and if you don’t know what we mean by that, well, use your imagination. 

Other words are cycled out of the common vernacular as people decide they are no longer suitable for use. For instance, the word elderly is considered offensive now when 10 years ago no one would bat an eye over it. A term like “older adult” is considered less offensive.

The term “euphemism treadmill” was devised to explain this habit we have of declaring a word taboo, replacing it until that new word is taboo, and then coming up with yet another term. “Cripple” becomes “handicapped” becomes “disabled” becomes “person with a disability.” All words start as the polite new term until the emotional charge behind it or the way people use it becomes intolerable and a new term is needed.

Despite what the media would have you believe, we’re actually living in the most peaceful time in human history. There’s no doubt that the world is in a bit more chaos than it was, say, five years ago, but largely, it’s still way better than even fifty years ago. We’re just more connected than ever, giving us a direct glimpse into global human suffering we’ve never had before.

See Also: 10 Indications That Western Society Is Collapsing

That said, ‘more peaceful than any time in history’ isn’t really saying much, as human history has been excessively violent for the most part. We may be more civilized and peaceful than before, but there’s still a lot to be done. We still live in times of gross mass deprivation and chaos in huge swathes of the world, with millions of people going through their own unique apocalypse scenario on a daily basis. You’d think that after so many millennia of existing, we’d have figured out how to fix the worst aspects of our civilization. Clearly, we haven’t.

As it turns out, there are perfectly legit, scientific reasons for why our society – and psyche – is inherently hardwired in a way that makes it difficult to solve the larger issues.

10We’re Surprisingly Easy To Fool

A logical fallacy is one of those things that are surprisingly difficult to spot, but impossible to miss once you know what you’re looking for. From advertising to politics, we’re bombarded with logical arguments that fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. As an example, politicians around the world regularly attack whistleblowers and people putting spotlight on an issue rather than the issue itself (known as ad hominem in the logical fallacy circles). The worst part? We fall for it, as it’s not always as clearly obvious.

It’s not because we’re all are simply dumb, it’s just that logical fallacies are incredibly difficult to spot by our brains, especially the ones hidden beneath otherwise-reasonable arguments. Another reason they’re so persuasive is that they appeal to the part of the brain that already wants to be convinced to some extent. To use the previous example, someone who already thinks that whistleblowers are bad for society – the degree of their conviction notwithstanding—is more likely to discredit their information and attack their personal life than someone with a neutral or favorable stand on them.^[1]

9 We’re Bad At Probability

Let’s say that an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, and the probability of collision is one in million. That sounds like something that would make most people panic, as an asteroid flying towards Earth with any odds is a bad thing. Interestingly, though, if you raise the odds to somewhere around one in ten thousand, chances are that your panic would be similar. That’s despite the fact that the earlier odds weren’t that high, as asteroids are hurtling towards Earth with some probability all the time.

The reason that happens is because people are intuitively bad at gauging probability. If a coin lands on tails five times, most people would think that the probability of heads on the next go is higher, even if it’s 50/50 for all the throws, regardless of previous outcome.

This inability to intuitively understand probability results into larger problems. For an example, this is how politicians prop up non-issues over genuine, widespread problems and win. As long as the problem looks threatening enough, it would resonate with most of us, even if it’s statistically not that likely to happen.^[2]

8 We Automatically Associate Ourselves With Groups

Conflict has been a part of human society for as long as we know, and most of it happens between groups. It doesn’t matter where the divisions lie – religion, country, sects, familial clans etc. – we find a way to get some people together, find common cause and fight with others doing the same. Associating with groups has been a pretty great survival strategy, too, as the strongest groups in history are the only ones that survived.

On the other hand, it’s also what causes problems like racism and religious wars. It doesn’t matter if your group is generally peaceful and awesome; someone would say that it’s the best and seek to destroy the others in its name sooner or later.

Why does this work so well every time? It’s because we’re evolutionarily trained to do that. Many studies – including ones done on babies—have proven that humans are born with an inbuilt preference for people that’re similar to us, which makes perfect sense as we’re social, group-based creatures. Research has also shown that we’re attracted to people who’re like us, which makes sure that the bloodlines don’t stray too far from our respective group. It doesn’t mean that nature is racist, it just means that societal evils like racism come from the same evolutionary mechanism that once gave us a definite advantage in hostile conditions.^[3]

7 We Require Chaos And Destruction To Progress

‘Why can’t we just sit and build things instead of fighting each other’ is a sentiment almost everyone who doesn’t profit from conflict would agree with. It seems to be true, too, as we already have the tools and resources to innovate and progress without having to fight for them. Sure, there was a time when invasion and war for necessary to obtain rare resources and gain technological advances, but in a world of free global trade, that isn’t a problem anymore. So, why don’t we?

The answer is simple; we literally need war and conflict to technologically innovate. An overwhelming number of our most useful everyday tech has come from times of war. It’s not just about technology; our modern ideas of liberty, human rights, democracy and so many things we now take for granted were formulated as direct results of war. So many prosperous and technologically advanced empires in history were also coincidentally the ones with a new type of technology on the battlefield, or at least a new way to use existing technology, which carried over to civilian applications. Building new types of arrows gave way to better knowledge of aerodynamics, improving armor made us better at metal working etc.

It’s not because humans are inherently bloodthirsty. Because of our violent history, we’re able to come up with new things much more efficiently when we’re faced with conflict and existential threat. That’s not to say that peaceful times in history have been devoid of any technological innovation, though most of them were built on the heels of massive wars themselves.^[4]

6 Human Memory Is Scarily Unreliable And Easy To Manipulate

We’ve all heard about the dangers of revisionism and repeating the mistakes of history, and yet, we still do it without abandon anyway. Many countries around the world are fighting for reasons similar to those as far back as hundreds of years ago. It makes you wonder if we’re just bad at record keeping, or simply doomed to repeat our mistakes over and over again by some higher entity.

As it turns out, it’s neither of those. We’re actually pretty good at learning from our mistakes, as is clearly demonstrated by our ability to evolve. When it comes to public memory about past events, though, our memory is surprisingly shaky and easy to manipulate. Many studies have shown that as long as your argument is convincing enough, it’s quite easy to plant outright faulty memories and get away with it. Memory is also not an accurate representation of how you remember, but a jumbled-up version created by your brain based on best guesses and projections.^[5]

5 Our History Is Unreliable

People think of history as facts set in stone, as how can it not be? Keeping a record of history has always been one of the most qualified jobs in almost all societies in history, and we have to say that historians have done a good job at it, too. That’s why we believe them when they say that history isn’t actually facts at all, but our best guess at what happened based on what we could find.

That’s made worse by the fact that record keeping has been limited to specific sections of societies throughout history, which means that a lot of different groups and timelines are excluded from what we know as popular history. Finding different voices and corroborating information from different sources is a big part of a historian’s jobs, though it’s not possible in more cases than you’d imagine. Huge chunks of our history – especially in the southern half of the world – are either unreliable or outright missing, along with crucial advancements in aspects like agriculture, politics, technology etc.^[6]

4 Emotions Over Rationality

Take a look around the world, and you’d feel lucky to live in a largely peaceful country (if you live in a largely peaceful country, of course). Even today, many countries are ruled by authoritarian regimes, with curtailed freedoms and lack of fundamental rights. The worst part? Many of those regimes have widespread support from the people. Heck, some are even democracies. That’s right, much like our history, people are actually choosing obviously harmful leaders.

If you think it’s because some populations are simply too dumb to make the right decisions, that’s not just inappropriate, but also pretty inaccurate. As proven by the Second World War, a country doesn’t need to be a third world conflict zone to actively support dictators or dictatorial regimes.

The reason people still elect extremists and authoritarian rulers is that we’re not really good at listening to our rational minds. The emotional part of the brain overrides the rational part almost every time, and we’re not just talking about electing dictators. It affects the politics of functioning democracies, too. Our lack of rationality is why policy-making is more about appealing to the emotions of your voter (and donor, of course) base than implementing solutions that would actually help, even – and especially—when those two things are on conflicting sides.^[7]

3 We’re Naturally Inclined To Conform

Social change – the good kind, anyway – is almost always a result of civil disobedience and social unrest. From women getting voting rights after decades of agitation in USA to the French Revolution inspiring ideas of liberty and personal freedom around the world, we owe a lot to people who didn’t just agree to societal norms of their day and decided to fight to change them. The only problem? Many of these cases were hundreds of years in the making, and only happened in the more recent chapters of history.

For the most part, people were just content with how things were, even if things get progressively worse the further back you go in history. Science backs it, too. We’d much rather conform to existing status quo for as long as we could rather than shake things up, because that’s just how we’re built. It’s evolutionarily costly to shake the existing structure of the society you’re in, which would have been important during our early days. Even those cases of unrest (and most other rebellions in history, even the failed ones) happened when things got so bad that people didn’t have any other option but to revolt, like economic stagnation and exorbitant taxes on a population already suffering from the excesses of war.^[8]

2 We Don’t Trust Each Other

Even in 2019, it’s still ridiculously easy to turn people against a particular group for political reasons, and we’re not just talking about any one country here. Hate crimes and sectarian violence is on the rise (again!) around the world, even at a time when everyone is so connected with each other. Mistrust between various races and other groups made sense in, say, 1800s—when no one knew any better to not hate one another – though it certainly doesn’t anymore.

According to science, the real reason we’re still unable to trust each other is just that; we’re physically unable to trust each other. Many studies have found that people are simply not wired to trust one another, which probably has to do with the dog-eat-dog era that has been our collective history. There’s also a definite trust deficient among people around the world, and it’s on the rise in many countries including the United States. So, when economic and social conditions in a vulnerable country get worse and extremist leaders start gaining ground, it’s easy to turn that lack of trust into all-out hatred.^[9]

1 More Power Is Related To Reduced Empathy

Even if things seem to be good in many parts of the world, there are still regions that are grappling with severe problems. That’s not to mention the problems that’re looming ahead for all of us, like rising sea levels and pollution. Unsurprisingly, many of these problems could be solved overnight if the richest and most powerful people around the world decided to donate even a tiny percentage of their wealth.

If you think it’s because they lack empathy, you’d be right. Not in the way that it’s only the cold ones that can be rich and powerful, but more because we all lose empathy when we gain power. It’s not just us saying it; studies prove that people become less socially aware and emotionally alert with rising social status and power level at the workplace. It’s just the way we evolved, explaining – in essence – the biggest and most ironical problem with our world; the more power you have to change the society, the less likely you are to care about actually doing it.^[10]

We live in a wondrous era. Hardships that once proved deadly to even the hardiest of our cave-dwelling ancestors are at most a mild inconvenience to modern man. We dominate the top of the food chain as the apex predators. We domesticated ourselves and learned to outwit many of nature’s hazards.^[1] In America, we’ve become rich enough to afford HD TVs in virtually every home and we have so much food that we’re getting fat. One would think this would usher in utopian levels of joy and prosperity. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be happening for a lot of folks.

10 Amazing Women You’ve Never Heard Of

There are plenty of discontent people these days, and men and women may be feeling it in different ways. On the female side of things, it’s becoming clear that women are pretty unhappy in general. Their antidepressant use is twice as high as men’s.^[2] The odd thing is that they are, in many ways, inadvertently doing this to themselves.

10 The Contraceptive Pill

Contraceptive pills are commonly used by women for more than just the obvious. They’re used to help regulate menstruation, reduce acne, and treat endometriosis, among other things. But those helpful little pills might not be all they’re cracked up to be. A new study shown at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America revealed that women who were taking oral contraceptives had a significantly smaller hypothalamus – a part of the brain that helps regulate mood.^[3] One preliminary finding was that smaller hypothalamic volume correlates with depressive symptoms. If this holds true after more studies and analyses, the pill might have to be replaced.

9 College And Education

A woman’s advancement in higher education is typically considered to be a great and noble endeavor. After all, they haven’t always been free to smarten up like their male counterparts (and in many parts of the world still aren’t). However, all those long nights of studying and hard work may not be benefiting their mental health. Female students are more likely to experience anxiety^[4] and stress.^[5] They also tend to go for more people-oriented majors like teaching,^[6] psychology, and social work, which lands them careers with generally lower market value (pay) than for those who venture into STEM fields. And while money doesn’t necessarily buy happiness, it certainly helps.

8 Pets Over Children

Over the millennia, women have fine-tuned nurturing instincts that make them fantastic at caring for infants and toddlers. In terms of evolution, it makes perfect sense since kids are basically needy danger magnets, and someone’s got to care for them. These instincts, however, are being diverted away from the needs of children to pets.^[7] To parallel this phenomenon, women are also having less kids.^[8] While dogs and cats might be great additions to the family, the more recent fad of would-be moms taking to them as “fur babies” overlooks one simple fact: pets don’t last.^[9] Their companionship is very limited compared to having an actual child and they don’t provide much useful support to an aging retiree beyond their mere presence. Who will take care of “dog moms” when they are old and their surrogate children are gone? Probably not the government, since they’re going broke.^[10]

7 Alcohol Abuse

While booze could be considered a social lubricant and a reprieve from one’s sorrows, everyone knows the dangers of overconsumption; sickness, impairment, addiction, and liver damage. Hangovers are also less than fun. Alcoholism can be quite the curse, especially for the ladies,^[11] as they have experienced a more than 83% increase in alcohol abuse disorder rates from 2002-2013. Women who abuse alcohol can also suffer infertility as a result, and 18% of women who are of child-bearing age binge drink. However, wine producers are presumably enjoying the business.

6 Working 9–5

Women entering the workforce and competing with men is a testament to how much their place in society has changed in the modern age. They have much more control over the course their lives take. However, the decision (now a necessity for many) to work rather than embrace the traditional role of homemaker has had some unintended consequences for women trying to balance this relatively new paradigm with motherhood. A 2009 survey found that 62% of working moms would rather work part-time and only 21% of adults said the growing trend of women with young children working outside the home was a good thing.^[12] A Gallup poll found that in six different job characteristics,^[13] female workers are 8-12% less satisfied than male workers.

10 Incredible Things That Were Discovered By Women

5 Sexual Freedom

Our attitude toward premarital sex has drastically changed in the U.S. and across the western world. These days it is much more accepted and is somewhat the norm. For women, the results of promiscuity are pretty catastrophic. There’s the obvious increased potential to contract STDs and get pregnant, but what isn’t so well-known is the effect on marriage stability.^[14] The more sexual partners a woman has, the more likely she is to divorce, should she ever get married. Virgins only have a divorce rate of about 5%, while having just two partners brings it up to 30%. For women that sleep around, they will likely have a harder time staying happily married when the time comes to settle down.

4 Delaying Motherhood

While becoming a mom isn’t at the top of every woman’s dream board, it’s certainly a priority for many. And since their pursuit of such an endeavor is the whole reason humanity keeps trundling along through the generations, we should be glad. For some ladies, though, the time they are willing to make a nest and raise children is being pushed back to as late as their forties.^[15] By waiting so long, they face a higher risk for miscarriage and birth defects.^[16] When women age and hit the wall in their thirties, the quality and quantity of their eggs rapidly declines,^[17] which may ultimately leave them infertile should they delay too long.

3 Getting Divorced

Virtually every marriage begins with the notion that it will last forever. Newlyweds are often optimistic about their futures. Unfortunately, love isn’t always as powerful as people think. Though divorce rates in the U.S. are falling over time, marriage rates are as well.^[18] Women initiate 69% of divorces,^[19] which would suggest they are generally ending up better off for doing so, but that isn’t the case. First marriages have about a 41% chance of divorce, while second marriages see an increase to 60%. Third marriages don’t get any better as they have a 73% failure rate. When a woman ends her first marriage, she is statistically unlikely to ever find her happily ever after. And while men tend to experience more strain in the short term after a divorce, women experience longer term strain once their marriages end, as their risk of poverty increases.^[20] Married couples are also more satisfied with their lives than divorced or single people.^[21]

2 Losing Their Religion

Religiosity used to be pretty common in America. In a lot of places, going to church on Sundays was seen as just part and parcel of participating in one’s community. It wasn’t uncommon for members of the same religious affiliation to get together for banquets, holidays, and charity work. And for some folks that is still a reality. But that is rapidly changing for much of the U.S. Faithful Americans are becoming less and less numerous by the day,^[22] which could be bad news as religious people tend to be happier.^[23] Women might be facing the greatest effects of this change, since they are usually more religious than men (especially in Christianty).^[24] Researchers found that women tend to feel a sense of existential security in religion, which is fading from their lives.^[25]

1 Social Media Menace

Social media can be addictive,^[26] and it’s only gotten more popular over the years.^[27] After all, who doesn’t like showing off cool vacation photos and scrolling through memes in the bathroom? Statistically, women are especially fond of using it, as they like to browse photo-heavy platforms like Facebook and Instagram.^[28] They are social creatures, after all.^[29] However, this newfound ability to keep up with everybody’s personal business 24/7 might not be such a good thing. A study on social media use in Sweden found that women who spend more time on Facebook are less happy.^[30] Another showed that using more social media platforms was associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety,^[31] which women are more prone to than men.^[32]

10 Of History’s Most Scandalous Women

Whenever a politician says or does something the other side doesn’t like, they are often compared to Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist party. Many online discussions will eventually result in people who lack the cognitive facilities to rationally form an argument calling their debating opponent a Nazi and some countries are even passing laws (or pushing for the same) to remove free speech from those whose views they don’t like by using linguistic sleight of hand and calling it “anti hate speech” legislation.

Calling someone a Nazi or comparing the modern world to the socio-political conditions that precipitated the rise of the Nazi party has somewhat desensitized the world to the horrors of what that word represents.

Still, there are several aspects of modern society that, when examined objectively, show similarities to the Weimar Republic’s collapse and the rise of the socialist Nazi party. This list takes a look at those similarities and examines how history may end up repeating itself if we are not careful.

Top 10 Myths Involving the Nazis

10 A Worldwide Pandemic

When the Great War concluded on November 11th, 1918, the world saw an end to a conflict that resulted in the deaths of 20 million people.^[1] That massive number of casualties escalated warfare to new levels, but they paled in comparison to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.

That pandemic resulted in the deaths of 20 to 50 million people around the world, though some estimates put the number closer to 100 million. The pandemic is often recalled these days as a comparison to the COVID-19 pandemic that originated in China in early 2020.

There are many similarities between the H1N1 Influenza A viral outbreak of 1918 and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that began in 2020. Both pandemics gripped the world, causing millions of infections and millions of deaths. They were both linked to a foreign origin and resulted in targeted xenophobia by various populations.^[2]

While the “Chinese virus” is far less deadly than the “Spanish flu” that preceded it by a century, it has severely impacted the way we live and work.^[3]

9 Scapegoating Is Alive And Well

The core of Hitler’s ideology was racially built around his belief that the German race, which he called Aryan, was superior to all others. Most conservatives in pre-Nazi Germany didn’t follow his views. Still, they went along with Hitler’s socialist party for all the economic good being promised. As the Nazis rose to power, they did so upon the backs of everyone Hitler believed to be inferior.

This included the Jews, Romani, the disabled, homosexuals, and other communities who weren’t considered pure Germans. The Nazis placed the blame for most of society’s problems on the Jews and enacted policies to strip them of their rights, property, and eventually, their humanness.^[4] Scapegoating worked well for the Nazis, and it’s alive and well today.

Fortunately, people aren’t being rounded up in concentration camps like they were in the 1930s, but scapegoating has become a powerful party platform for many worldwide on both sides of the political spectrum in equal measure. Conservatives blame illegal immigration and floods of refugees for the problems of their particular nations while liberals blame conservatives (mostly in the form of white males) for all of their problems.

While many point to the States’ vilification of South American illegal immigrants (deceptively conflated by the media as enmity with all immigrants including legal ones) and foreign refugees, it’s hardly the only country that does this. Scapegoating migrants and immigrants (legal or otherwise) has occurred in various countries during epidemics going back to the Black Death, and it’s been widely used to blame an economic downturn on outsiders in nations across the planet.^[5]

8 A Hyperpolarization Of Politics

For most of its history, the United States has featured a somewhat cooperative government. While the bi-party system has resulted in many disagreements, work was still completed, and the nation grew as a result. Unfortunately, the days of compromise are behind us, and the United States has devolved into a hyperpolarization of political ideologies.

This isn’t unique to the United States, and other countries around the world are seeing their political ideologies stand in opposition to one another. This limits government processes, and even more dangerously, it pits two ideological sides against one another, which can become dangerous.

The same happened in pre-Nazi Germany, thanks, in part, to a man named Paul von Hindenburg, the President of Germany. He took a burgeoning democracy and turned it into a dictatorship by ceding control to the chancellor, who built up his side to suit his purposes, and then blew past them when he rose to power. In like manner, the communists were a growing threat and fears were growing that they would perform a socialist revolt similar to the one seen in Russia in which the Tsar and his family were butchered along with all opponents of globalist socialism.^[6]

This was made possible by several issues, including the Great Depression. Still, it likely wouldn’t have happened had the German people not been so ideologically divided as they were. The hyperpolarization of politics in 1920s Germany resulted in the degradation of democratic norms, making it possible for the Nazis to take over.^[7]

7 A Rise In Sexual Liberty & Gay Rights In The 1920s And 2020s

In 1929, Germany had a serious movement to repeal anti-gay legislation known as “Paragraph 175,” which criminalized homosexuality. It was repealed in 1994, but it nearly happened 65 years earlier, before the Nazis rose to power.

Germany (and much of Europe) was on the cusp of liberating its gay (and transsexual and transvestite) citizens. As a result, the country was filled with gay bars and cafes. Gay people were more open and out at the time, and the movement had a strong chance of doing away with anti-gay legislation.^[8]

The Nazis’ rise to power and put a stop to all of that. They didn’t just keep the law in place — they rounded up and imprisoned anyone they believed to be members of the gay community. Those days are behind us in most parts of the world, but there is a correlation between the rise of gay openness in 1920s Germany and today.

Modern society has seen a great many changes made in the gay rights movement. Gay marriage is now legal in many nations, and previous prohibitions placed on homosexuals have been lifted.

6 Ruined Economies Foster Resentment

When WWI came to an end, Germany was left in ruins. The country was not only in need of rebuilding, but its economy was in shambles. Additionally, it was forced to pay hefty reparations to France and other countries on the winning side of the conflict and had large swathes of productive land confiscated.^[9]

The Nazis used the economic disaster and the Great Depression to their benefit. They developed a protectionist economic policy that promised to boost the German people from the ruinous post-war economy.

It worked by amassing a large population of people to their side with the promise of jobs, money which wasn’t hyper-inflated by the central bank, and a better tomorrow. Global economies are different today than in the early 20th century, but there are still many parallels.

The world saw a bank-caused Great Recession from 2007 until 2009, which saw many Americans lose their homes.^[10] The Great Recession did a number on the economy in the States, but it didn’t just impact the U.S., as nations worldwide suffered severe economic disasters. Greece underwent a government-debt crisis from 2009 until 2018, nearly destroying the country’s economy.

5 Widespread Distrust In The Media

When Donald Trump began his campaign for President of the United States, he wasn’t shy about calling out various news and media organizations as fake news. Trust in the media plummeted during his presidency. Even after leaving office, his claims of fake news persist primarily regarding the majority left-wing news outfits like CNN, the New York Times, and most others.

Hitler never used the phrase “fake news”, but he certainly adopted one that was similar. Lügenpresse is German for “lying press,” and it’s perfectly analogous to “fake news.” The term goes back centuries and the Marxists used it to refer to the media when they wrote damning articles about communism and socialism. Hitler often called the media out for lying and manipulating the truth by using the same term.

Widespread distrust in the media was prevalent in pre-Nazi Germany, and it’s prevalent now. When people lose faith in the integrity of the news media, they become susceptible to manipulation and influence from other spheres. That worked well in the 1920s and ‘30s for Hitler and his national socialist party and it works well now for those controlling the new means of news dissemination: social media and tech giants.^[11][12]

4 Socialist Globalism Is Back and So Is Socialist Nationalism

The Nazi Party was one thing above all else — it was a nationalist movement (extreme patriotism). It arose in Munich after WWI when people upset over the Treaty of Versailles met to discuss their political views. A trend toward socialist nationalism developed to combat the globalist principles of the burgeoning German Communist movement (as seen in the attempted coup of the 1919 Spartacist uprising), and the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP) was established in 1920.

National Socialism helped bring the Nazis to power, as it focused the people’s attention on their own national needs. It placed German workers above other communities and found scapegoats for the nation’s problems in the Jews, immigrants, and other “undesirable” members of society.^[13]

In the United States, the Republican party ran in the 2016 election with the phrase, “Make America Great Again,” which was further developed into an ideology that put “America First.” American neo-nationalism similarly prioritizes the country above others (much to the chagrin of the globalist movement again rising under the new brand of “Democratic” socialism). As has happened previously in the States, illegal-immigrants were blamed for the country’s problems.

America was hardly alone in moving back towards nationalism in the 21st century. It’s also making a comeback in Europe, with Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Italy, and others seeing a rise in Nationalist movements in their recent parliamentary elections.^[14]

3 Propaganda Has Taken Over Social Media For Millions Of People

The Nazi use of propaganda is one of the most successful tools employed by Hitler and Goebbels. Leading up to the party’s rise and well through its established dominance in Germany, propaganda stood as the most important weapon available to the Nazis.

Propaganda helped convince the German people that their political opponents and the Jews were responsible for all their troubles. It helped convince the people that their only salvation was the election of Adolf Hitler, and it kept the people in check when the government turned on those same people who put them into power.

Propaganda was a psychological operation of masterful deceit, and it has a modern comparison in social media. Social media platforms have given a voice to every person on the planet, and while some choose to speak out (at the risk of being “cancelled” or silenced), many more listen closely to what they’re told.

Propaganda spread through social media has impacted and influenced millions of people into believing all manner of bizarre things. Through sites like Facebook, Twitter, instagram, and others, people have been roped into believing all kinds of novel or crazy ideas, including many promoted at the time of the Nazis in the 1920s and early ’30s.^[15][16]

2 An American “Insurrection”

As the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election got closer and closer, the country appeared to be on a tipping point. The people were voting in what was often cited as “the most important election in history” by folks on both sides. More people voted in the election than at any other point in American history.^[17]

The result saw Joe Biden defeat the incumbent, Donald Trump, but it didn’t end there. Court challenges and claims of a stolen election ultimately reached a boiling point that saw thousands of people amass on the U.S. Capitol Building in protest.^[18]

The January 6th event was one of the most shocking developments in recent U.S. history, and it has a historical comparison to pre-Nazi Germany. In 1923, Adolf Hitler and other leaders in the Nazi party attempted a coup d’état in Munich. The “Beer Hall Putsch” resulted in 20 deaths and landed Hitler in prison for treason.^[19]

The U.S. protest wasn’t an attempted coup. Still, it does share similarities with the overall sentiment expressed by the Nazis of the 1920s. Specifically, a belief that dark forces betrayed the people, and the only recourse was a confrontation. The Nazis weren’t successful in ’23, but a decade later, they rose to power.

1 Growing Worldwide Instability

Before the Nazis rose to power, the Weimar Republic was in disarray. This was primarily due to the end of the Great War, but the Great Depression that followed didn’t help. In fact, the majority of the countries in the world were subjected to instability. New borders were drawn throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia, which caused many problems.

While Germany was only one nation among many dealing with these problems, it was right at the center of them, thanks to its participation in the war. Over time, resentment and further global instability helped the Nazis rise to power, resulting in even more instability with the global outcry from the peaceful annexation of Austria (known as the Anschluss or War Of Flowers due to the German military being greeted by cheering Austrians who showered them with flowers, a scene repeated during World War II during which Ukrainian peasants saw the Germans as their liberators from the horrors of socialism under the Soviet government), which was followed by German demands for the return of territorial losses resulting from the Versailles Treaty and, later, territory over which Germany had no legitimate claim.^[20]

The world is a complicated place filled with numerous governments, economies, and ideologies, so it’s always in a state of relative instability. Still, it’s been a lot more unstable since the 21st century began with the 9/11 attacks. The global fight against Islamic terrorism has destabilized the Middle East and caused problems around the world.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war in Ukraine are further indications of international instability comparable to pre-Nazi Germany in the 1920s and early ’30s.^[21] If these situations continue to devolve, the world may find itself in similar circumstances that precipitated the Nazi’s rise to power.

One thing is for sure, digital book burnings, cancel culture, and the abolition of free speech are not the answer to the problems of today.

Top 10 Plans Hitler Would Have Put In Motion If The Nazis Had Won

As history shows, we’re not nearly as smart as we think we are. Witch-burning, bloodletting, and eugenics are just a few examples of how once-established theories proved not only incorrect but insane.

Have we learned from our asinine assumptions? You be the judge. With one uterus-unraveling exception, the following are more modern instances where the general consensus was generally nonsense.

Top 10 Reasons The Dark Ages Were Not Dark

10 Pain, Pain, Go Away

It started with the best of intentions. About three decades ago, a push began to find medications that more effectively relieved pain for chronic conditions (like back issues or arthritis), post-surgery recovery, and terminal illnesses (such as late-stage cancer).

In 1995, Purdue Pharma introduced what was quickly billed a wonderdrug: OxyContin. Percocet and Vicodin soon joined the pill-poppin’ party as, throughout the late 1990s, pharmaceutical companies reassured the medical community patients would not become addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers. Healthcare providers started prescribing them at exponentially greater rates.

The painkillers were efficient at both pain and killing. Opioid addiction and overdose deaths surged. By 2017 an estimated 1.7 million Americans had substance use disorders related to prescription opioid pain relievers. But hey – at least their arthritis wasn’t acting up.

Also in 2017, the esteemed Mayo Clinical published a postmortem on the opioid crisis’s widespread… well, mortem. An excerpt from the abstract says it all: “Good intentions to improve pain and suffering led to increased prescribing of opioids, which contributed to misuse of opioids and even death.” Perhaps the initial concept – that the acceptable amount of pain is zero – was flawed from the get-go?

In the 12 months ending September 2020, a record 87,000 Americans died of drug overdoses. In October 2020, Purdue Pharma plead guilty to federal criminal charges, part of a settlement of over $8 billion. Neither of those facts are coincidences.

9 Back in the USSR: Russia’s Relapse

It seems incredible that, barely 20 years ago, hopes were high throughout Western Civilization that Russia, emerging from the ashes of the USSR’s 1991 implosion, would embrace its former adversaries and join the fraternity of developed democracies.

It started very promisingly. After US president Ronald Reagan thawed the deep freeze and forged a working relationship with his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, oversaw the USSR’s collapse with his trademark gloat-free grace – deftly setting a diplomatic reset button. (In fact, Bush’s outstanding performance during the Soviet Union’s collapse is why most rank him among the finest one-term presidents in US history).

Unfortunately, Russia’s new leader was a naive drunk. President Boris Yeltsin tried to convert Russia’s state-dependent economy into near-total capitalism far too quickly. The fallout was severe: Through the 1990s, Russia’s GDP fell by 50%, vast sectors of the economy were wiped out, inequality and unemployment grew dramatically, while incomes fell.

Russia first democratic president was so poor that he also became its last. In 2000, Yeltsin was succeeded by his Prime Minister, a young ex-KGB agent named Vladimir Putin. Twenty years of dissent-squashing, Syria-backing, Ukraine-invading and election-interfering later, and it’s safe to say that Russia is every bit the nuclear-armed menace now that it was for most of the late 20th Century.

8 Not So Fast

Throughout history, there have been widely held misconceptions concerning physics. People once thought the Earth was both flat and the center of the universe. Many thought the laws of nature prevented man-made flight – including the brilliant John Adams, until he witnessed one of the first-ever hot air balloon ascensions in Paris, in 1783.

Less widely known is a commonly held belief of the early 19th Century concerning the development of rail travel. Quite simply, many thought speed literally killed. Fetuses, that is.

New technologies often bring with them unfounded fears (remember cell phone brain tumors?). When rail travel was introduced, it brought with it the potential to move far faster than man had ever gone before. Women, however, were a different story: at or around speeds of 50 miles per hour, many thought a woman’s uterus would fall out. How’s that for a Plan B?

According to cultural anthropologist Genevieve Bell, misogyny has been a drumbeat behind many a tech-centric moral panic. For example, when electric lighting was starting to proliferate, “experts” thought that lighting homes would endanger women and children by letting predators know they were home at night. And when automobiles gained momentum in the early 1900s, many felt that women – considered prone to fainting, physical weakness, and random bouts of hysteria – would be unable to handle such high-speed responsibility, and should therefore be disallowed from driving. Saudi Arabia concurred for over a century.

7 The Original Social Distancing

Remember when everyone thought social media would bring people closer?

Some form of social media – loosely defined as online gathering places – has existed since the advent of the Internet itself. But while AOL chatrooms, MeetUp and MySpace certainly played their part in normalizing these new platforms, it was the 2004 debut of Facebook that took social networking fully mainstream.

Facebook’s intentions – its stated ones, anyway – were innocent enough. Suddenly, we could all give a custom-built list of “friends” access to our musings and photos, and share links to stories we found interesting. We could crowdsource recommendations from people we knew and trusted, organize events with like-minded hobbyists, and stay in closer touch with folks we seldom see IRL.

Seventeen years and 2.8 billion users later, Facebook – along with its 280-character cohort, Twitter – are two of the most culpable culprits in the intractable culture wars that have engulfed much of Western civilization, and the US and UK in particular. Sites selling togetherness have accomplished the exact opposite – and the reason, unsurprisingly, is money.

It’s simple, really. To keep users engaged, social media sites use advanced algorithms to spoon-feed individual users more of what they want. That’s an (arguably) innocuous thing when, for example, someone clicks on a pregnancy article and gets served up a baby stroller ad. The danger comes in politics specifically. Liberals get more woke nonsense and flawed logic, conservatives get more anti-liberal memes and cancellation, and in short order we’re in an uncivil war fought largely online.

6 High Crimes

“Instead of a war on poverty,” Tupac Shakur rapped, “they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.”

The War on Drugs is a US government-led attempt to stop illegal drug use and distribution by dramatically increasing prison sentences for both dealers and users. Among other accomplishments, it has succeeded in stigmatizing and worsening drug abuse while giving America the world’s highest incarceration rate. Take that, El Salvador (#2) and Turkmenistan {#3). Non-violent crime arrest much?

Unsurprisingly, all drugs were not waged war upon equally. At the onset of the crack epidemic – which initially was largely limited to Black communities—the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established what became known as the 100:1 ratio. Ridiculously, five grams of crack carried a minimum mandatory sentence of five years in prison, while the same sentence for its more expensive counterpart—powdered cocaine, pervasive in white America—came at five HUNDRED grams.

That law came under Republican Ronald Reagan. But the drug war’s most flagrant foul likely came in 1994, with a bill signed into law by one Democratic president (Clinton) and written by a future one – actually, the current one. Then-Senator Joe Biden authored the deceptively-named Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act. The law gave states billions to build more prisons, and established grant programs incentivizing police to pursue more drug-related arrests, especially for low-priority substances like marijuana. Feed that prison industrial complex beast, Joe.

5 The Facemask Facepalm

Hi medical science, my name is common f*cking sense. Have we met?

No one side in the COVID-19 situation has a monopoly on virus-combatting protocols. Liberals would lock the world down until both the virus and the global economy vanish, while conservatives think the simple act of donning a piece of fabric is an unforgivable infringement on freedom.

However, it is the experts’ responsibility to make health recommendations, and when they tarnish their own reputations early in a crisis, the results can be deadly. Such was the case when, as the virus gained steam in the US in late February and early March, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other experts said wearing facemasks was unnecessary.

Fauci later explained that, at the time, “we were not aware that 40 to 45% of people were asymptomatic, nor were we aware that a substantial proportion of people get infected from people who are without symptoms.”

This is a shockingly poor excuse. By late February it was clear that a new virus was spreading with a pace and ferocity not seen in decades. Crucially, it should have been obvious to contagious disease experts like Fauci that so rapid a proliferation CLEARLY INDICATED airborne, asymptomatic spread. Common sense says it would be almost impossible for a new virus to spread that far, that fast otherwise.

There was no other logical conclusion, and it stands as the most consequential misstep in the early response to a disease that has killed more than three million people.

4 Smoke and Mirrors

“If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one.”

You’d expect such a quote to come from a tobacco company executive. But that was Wilhelm Carl Hueper, director of the Environmental Cancer Section of the National Cancer Institute, who gave the public the all clear to smoke ‘em if you got ‘em in 1954.

From the 1930s to 1950s, one of advertising’s most powerful phrases – “doctors recommend” – helped peddle one of the world’s deadliest consumer products: cigarettes. “Give your throat a vacation,” one magazine ad for Camel cigarettes was headlined, “smoke a fresh cigarette.”

Even as smoker’s cough proliferated and concerns understandably grew about the healthfulness of… well, inhaling smoke, Camel also made the reassuring claim that “more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” In the runup to making that claim, they conducted a survey of doctors in which participants were paid with – what else? – Camel cigarettes.

Before the mid-20th Century, such health-conscious claims were unnecessary because, oddly, people in societies around the world thought no long-term physical harm could come from sucking on burning sticks all day. It wasn’t until the 1940s that international teams of epidemiologists started concretely linking smoking to lung cancer, mostly because the proliferation of cigarette smoking directly paralleled with a surge in that once-rare terminal illness.

3 America’s Delusional Decade

Many look back on the 1990s as the American Decade. Starting roughly with November 1989’s fall of the Berlin Wall – a death knell for the collapsing Soviet Union – the 90s were a brief but brilliant time in which Western Civilization had triumphed over soviet socialism and totalitarianism, and when America stood alone as the world’s sole superpower.

Looking back, perhaps the height of our hubris was “The End of History,” a 1992 book by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama. The influential tome argued that the ascendance of Western liberal democracy represented “not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Great! Westerners could all relax. No need to… say… clean up our defenses while we had a breather. Like, for example, maybe not have the cockpit doors of commercial airliners be about as secure as a mall restroom?

First Clinton and then (W.) Bush largely ignored the growing Islamic terrorism threat. Atop the global food chain and buffered by two oceans, America was untouchabl…

… with first one plane crash then another 18 minutes later, the 1990s ended a year late but promptly on September 11, 2001. The rest is history – and by no means the end of history.

2 An Invincible Earth

Perhaps the most glaring example of mankind’s hubris is the notion our planet is so exceptional that we can inflict thousands of cuts without ushering in its death.

What makes it worse is that we used to know this. By the 1960s, developed countries around the world realized the woeful side effects of the Industrial Revolution. Most notably, the air quality in cities was terrible, and rivers and lakes were fetid.

Collective action was taken, because this wasn’t a controversial issue yet. In 1970, Republican President Richard Nixon created the US Environmental Protection Agency. Two years later, he signed the Clean Water Act into law. Countries around the world took similar measures to heal a wounded world.

Fast forward 50 years, and we’re… well, here. Still thinking landfills have infinite space. Still chopping down rainforests – invaluable carbon filters and oxygen suppliers – for not-good-enough reasons ranging from agriculture to oil drilling. And of course, still tied to the idea that we can continue burning fossil fuels producing enormous amounts of pollution while we could be focussing on cleaner options like nuclear power.

1 The Food Pyramid Scheme

In 1992, the US Department of Agriculture proudly debuted the Food Pyramid, a triangle to nutritional balance. It was based on the horrifically wrong dietary recommendations of the non-scientific and outright brainless committee run by the Democrat senator (and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate) George McGovern in 1977. At the tippy-top were foods the committee (against the advice of all doctors present) recommended minimizing; moving downward, the Pyramid fattened out to display food groups to consume more liberally.

So for example, a category called “Fats, Oils & Sweets” came to a point at the Pyramid’s peak. These foods were to be eaten so restrictively that no daily recommended allowances were given, only directions to “use sparingly.” Conversely, at the Pyramid’s base were foods to eat remorselessly – 6-11 serving daily, in fact. Of course, we’re talking about vegeta…

… wait, carbs?

That’s right. For over a decade, the official recommendation of the US government was that its citizens consume 6-11 servings of bread, pasta, rice or cereals PER DAY.

And despite the daily carbfest, Americans were told to make room for 2-3 servings of dairy and 2-3 servings of proteins – a category whose broad scope included everything from red meat to red beans, with a helluva lot of leeway in between.

Oh, and 2-4 servings of fruits and 3-5 servings of vegetables. Go ahead and count potatoes as veggies – you wouldn’t want to eat into that carb allotment.

In 2005, the USDA thoroughly revised the recommendations but, for no good reason, kept the Pyramid form – which made it look like an update rather than a redo. They later re-shaped it into a “food-plate” but the terrible dietary advice remains intact and all attempts to revert to the pre-war commonsense high-fat low-carb diet is met with vicious attacks from the media, politicians, and “academics”. Fast forward to today and 42% of Americans are obese.

Top 10 Tips For The Perfect Diet

In 1949, Eric Blair, known by the pen name of George Orwell, published 1984; a novel that has shown its predictive power manifested in the current state of society. Blair coined the term “Big Brother” for the symbolic figurehead of the totalitarian state, Oceania. In the dystopian society, every citizen is under constant surveillance with the government’s slogan: “Big Brother is watching you,” a reminder of the state’s omnipresence. Our government has taken a slightly different approach, but the end game is much the same. The leaks by Edward Snowden bring to light what many of us already believed, that the United States is moving closer and closer to a society where its citizens have nearly all actions monitored. In light of this, here are 10 ways that we’re living in a Big Brother Society without knowing it.

This is an encore of one of our previous lists, as presented by our YouTube host Simon Whistler. Read the full list!

Alongside diseases like cholera and smallpox, tuberculosis was one of the world’s biggest killers during the 19th century. Anyone unfortunate enough to contract the illness often didn’t survive it. Also known as “Consumption” or the “White Plague,” its symptoms made it easy to spot anyone afflicted by it. Extreme weight loss, a pale and fragile appearance, and the coughing up of blood all added to the strangely romanticized “tubercular aesthetic” that had a huge influence over the Victorians.

Here are ten of the ways in which the debilitating disease shaped Victorian society.

10 High Death Rates

The most obvious way in which tuberculosis affected Victorian society was, of course, the number of lives it took. It’s even believed to be the leading cause of death by any microbial pathogen in history. At the turn of the 19th century, around 50 million people worldwide were openly infected with it. What the Victorians didn’t know for a long time is that the disease, which attacks the lungs and damages various organs, is highly infectious. The poor sanitation and hygiene standards of the time created the perfect breeding ground for its proliferation.

Two of the worst affected places were the cities of London and New York. In Victorian England, it claimed around one in five lives of the entire population, with similar numbers in the United States. As one of the leading causes of death during the 19th century, it’s little wonder tuberculosis affected so many areas of society.^[1]

9 Beauty and Aesthetics

When tuberculosis was at its peak during the early to mid-19th century, it was heavily glamorized, despite it causing around 25% of deaths in Europe. Some of the physically apparent symptoms of the disease, such as emaciation and wasting away, were aligned with existing Victorian ideas of attractiveness. Subsequently, tuberculosis quickly became associated with beauty. Sufferers usually had a thin, fragile frame, pale skin with rosy cheeks, red lips, and sparkling eyes. These features were the ideal beauty standard of the time, which left many wishing to imitate it through the use of makeup.

Among the upper class of Victorian society, it was generally believed that a woman’s level of attractiveness could determine how likely she was to suffer from tuberculosis. The disease simply enhanced features considered beautiful in women. Since makeup was usually associated with prostitutes and actresses, however, most upper-class ladies actually hoped to contract the disease!^[2]

8 The Fashion

With the disease and its effects having become entwined with the ideals of beauty, tuberculosis soon played a role in the nature of 19th-century fashion. During the first half of the 1800s, consumption was believed to be caused by “bad airs” in the environment, as well as the result of a hereditary predisposition. At this time, when admiration for the pale, wasting appearance was at its peak, fashion trends tended to emulate and highlight symptoms of the disease. Pointed corsets were worn by women to emphasize tiny waists and were paired with huge, voluminous skirts to further show off the waifish look.

When tuberculosis came to be recognized as a bacterial disease during the second half of the 19th century, it still continued to have a huge influence over fashion. Large-scale public health campaigns were implemented in an effort to prevent the spread, and doctors claimed that large skirts could sweep up germs from the street and bring them into the home. Corsets were also criticized for limiting blood circulation and the movement of the lungs, which was quickly reconsidered to exacerbate tuberculosis. Even men’s fashion came under attack. Extravagant, bushy beards, sideburns, and mustaches that were at the height of fashion at the beginning of the century, were deemed too dangerous. The clean-shaven look was initially adopted primarily by physicians and surgeons, but the rest of male society soon followed.^[3]

7 Literature

The prevalence of tuberculosis within 19th-century European society led to its depiction in the various celebrated literary works of the time. These works certainly helped to shape the romantic image that the Victorians held of the disease. Tragic fictional icons who fell to the disease were common in 19th-century literature, including Katerina Ivanova in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Fantine from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.

A strange belief about tuberculosis also surrounded celebrated writers of the time. The prevalence of the disease meant that numerous individuals of extraordinary talent were also among its victims. This led to the notion that there was a link between tuberculosis and creative genius. Some notable writers among the mass of sufferers included Robert Louis Stevenson, John Keats, and Emily Brontë. All were said to have improved creative power as their physical conditions deteriorated. Unsurprisingly, this caused many literary and artistic types of the time to wish to contract tuberculosis.^[4]

6 Entertainment

The “tragic beauty” associated with tuberculosis also worked its way into the sphere of 19th-century entertainment. The upper crust of Victorian society would often frequent the opera, where heart-breaking stories of the beautiful victims of consumption would be portrayed. Two popular operas that explored the themes of the disease included La Traviata and Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme.

Based on a novel, the tragic story of La Traviata is a particularly romantic representation of tuberculosis. It follows the tale of two lovers: the young and beautiful courtesan Violetta and her secret admirer Alfredo. The story’s themes of love, joy, youth, and beauty are accompanied by the looming threat of disease and death, with Violetta’s consumption playing an increasingly large role as the tale progresses. Given that tuberculosis was so often represented within romantic contexts in the arts, it’s little wonder that the Victorians came to view it as a romantic disease.^[5]

5 Art

As with other areas of the creative sphere, the imagery depicted in many artworks produced by 19th-century artists was influenced by their own experiences of tuberculosis. Works of the 19th-century artist Ferdinand Hodler reflect his tragic childhood encounters with the disease, which had robbed him of his entire family. Some of his most significant works in this respect include “The Convalescent,” “Night Hodler,” and “A Troubled Soul.” It was a similar story for Edvard Munch, which inspired his works such as “The Sick Child” and “Sick Chamber.” Works such as these and others were significant in developing the more morbidly tragic notions that the Victorians associated with the illness.

As with literary artists, tuberculosis was associated with artistic genius on the canvas too. It was speculated that the low-grade fever accompanying tuberculosis might have been responsible for heightened perception and bursts of inspiration and insight.^[6]

4 An Obsession with Death

Death was a huge part of life for the Victorians, and as such, they were obsessed with it. Given that tuberculosis was one of society’s biggest killers (although, admittedly, there were a few!), the disease likely played a small yet significant role in fueling this obsession. The Victorians were ritualistic in their approach toward death and mourning, and it became a way of life for most.

The deathbed itself became an important focal point around which the departed’s last words were highly valued. In fact, “deathbed watches” and notions of a “good death” often featured prominently in the literature of the time, particularly the works of Charles Dickens. Complex codes of mourning were in place, including the requirement that a grieving woman must only wear black for exactly twelve months and a day. Jewelry created from the locks of the deceased’s hair was also produced, along with other mementos, such as death masks and portraits, which were given a place of pride around the home. In Victorian society, death, loss, and grief were simply seen as an inevitable and integral part of life.^[7]

3 Science

Although tuberculosis has been around for thousands of years, it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that scientists began to recognize that its transmission wasn’t simply the result of “bad airs” or genetic predisposition. It was the likes of the French chemist Louis Pasteur and the British surgeon Joseph Lister who developed germ theory around this time. However, while they were key figures in determining that germs cause disease, it was the German physician Robert Koch who first linked specific bacteria to certain diseases.

It was in 1882 that Koch announced his discovery that Tubercle bacillus caused tuberculosis. His experiments involving culturing and inoculating animals with the bacilli completely revolutionized the understanding of the disease and others like it. He also found that a mixture of saliva and mucus coughed up from the respiratory tract was the main way of spreading the disease. This led to huge changes in scientific understanding and the fields of medicine, hygiene, and sanitation in Victorian society.^[8]

2 Medicine and Hygiene

Koch’s discovery meant that Victorian society became acutely aware of the fact that tuberculosis was not only contagious but also very much tied to personal and public standards of hygiene. This meant the previous reliance on treatments such as a “change of air” and bloodletting would no longer cut it. Instead, public health measures were put in place to stop the spread of tuberculosis and other contagious diseases. These included the provision of clean water, waste removal, and separate sewage systems. New legislation was also implemented for improved housing to reduce overcrowding.

Within the medical field, improvements took place very rapidly. Technological equipment was developed to detect and treat diseases, and sterilization and antiseptic surgical procedures started to take place. In addition, specialized surgical instruments and techniques began to be developed. Ultimately, Koch’s discoveries started a chain reaction that led to a complete overhaul of the Victorian medical profession and the growth of the medical industry.^[9]

1 Social Reform

With growing awareness of the importance of hygiene and decent sanitation to prevent the spread of tuberculosis, it quickly became apparent that the poorer classes were the most at risk. Although concerns surrounding the living and working conditions of the poor were by no means initiated by Koch’s discovery, it certainly emphasized the importance of the matter. Fifty new statutes on housing were, therefore, put into place during the second half of the 19th century. The main target was to reduce overcrowding and improve the overall standard of living for the poorest members of society.

Various measures, reforms, and legislation were also put into place or updated to help the working class. Penny savings banks were established, early forms of insurance policies were offered, and communal resources were made available to assist the poorest members of Victorian society. Their vulnerability to tuberculosis and other diseases had further highlighted a burgeoning need to improve their living standards.^[10]