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Genetic Slavery

Keywords

war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing

Stone Age emotions. Medieval institutions. Godlike technology.

This is not a bug. It’s the operating system. And the operating system is trying to kill you with nuclear weapons and preventable disease simultaneously.

The Selfish Gene Made You Illogical (It Was a Good Idea at the Time)

Richard Dawkins put it perfectly: “We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”132

Translation: You’re a meat puppet controlled by chemicals whose entire business plan is “make more chemicals before something eats us.”

Your brain was designed for running from lions. Now it runs from emails. The hardware hasn’t caught up.

Your brain was designed for running from lions. Now it runs from emails. The hardware hasn’t caught up.

Your genes don’t care if you’re happy. They don’t care if you live past 30. They care about exactly one thing: making copies of themselves before something with teeth finds you.

For 99.9% of human history, this was brilliant engineering. Now it’s why you distrust strangers you need to cooperate with, build weapons you’ll never use, and fight over territory you don’t need. The genes are still celebrating. You are not.

Part 1: Your Brain Was Optimized for a World That Doesn’t Exist

The Violence Module (Or: Why You Tend to Prefer Bombs Over Band-Aids)

15-30% of your ancestors died from violence133. Not disease. Not starvation. Other humans, smashing their heads with rocks over territorial disputes about berry bushes. You’ve since upgraded the rocks to intercontinental ballistic missiles, but the berry bush energy remains.

You used to hoard rocks. Now you hoard nuclear weapons. Evolution is a slow learner.

You used to hoard rocks. Now you hoard nuclear weapons. Evolution is a slow learner.

The tribes that survived weren’t the peaceful, loving ones. They were the paranoid, survival-focused ones who:

  • Assumed every stranger might want to kill them (often statistically accurate)
  • Struck first when threatened (natural selection at work)
  • Formed tight combat groups to kill other groups (teamwork!)
  • Hoarded weapons obsessively (can never have too many pointy sticks)

Your brain is still running this exact software. That’s why:

  • You spend more preparing to kill each other than preparing to not die
  • You instinctively distrust people who don’t look like your tribe
  • Twitter arguments feel like actual combat (your amygdala can’t tell the difference)
  • Countries with thousands of nuclear weapons134 are worried they don’t have enough

The violence module kept your ancestors from getting clubbed to death. Now it’s building weapons that could end all life on Earth. Computer scientists call this “feature creep.” Biologists call it “maladaptive.” I call it “the reason I’m writing this book.”

The Tribal Brain (Or: Why Democracy Was Always Going to Be a Mess)

Dunbar’s number135 says humans can maintain stable relationships with about 150 people. That’s your entire social capacity. Your brain has 150 slots for caring about people, and you’ve filled most of them with coworkers you tolerate and celebrities who don’t know you exist.

Your brain understands 150 people. Democracy has 330 million people. Your brain is still counting on its fingers.

Your brain understands 150 people. Democracy has 330 million people. Your brain is still counting on its fingers.

Your brain treats anything outside your 150-person monkeysphere as an abstraction. That’s why:

  • You care more about your neighbor’s barking dog than 10,000 people dying of malaria (the dog is RIGHT THERE being loud, malaria is just a concept with numbers attached)
  • Local corruption makes you angrier than trillion-dollar Pentagon waste (the local guy stole $10,000 you can imagine; according to DOD audit failures, the Pentagon lost $2.5 trillion, which is just syllables)
  • You’ll donate to save one sick child but ignore statistics about millions (one child has a face, millions is just a very big number that makes your brain hurt)

Democracy asks this brain to make civilization-level decisions. It goes exactly as well as asking a labrador retriever to do your taxes. You vote based on:

  • Who looks stronger (your brain thinks the election is a wrestling match)
  • Who your tribe likes (if the clan approves, must be good)
  • Who makes you feel safe (fear sells better than policy ever will)
  • Who you’d have a beer with (relevance to nuclear policy: zero)

You elect leaders using the same brain circuits your ancestors used to pick the guy with the biggest club.

Part 2: Genetic Slavery is Literally Killing Us

Evolution prepared you for scarcity, predators, and violence136. You got abundance, safety, and Netflix. Your bodies responded with the biological equivalent of a computer trying to print a sandwich.

Here’s the cosmic joke: Humanity has never been safer, healthier, or more prosperous. You’ve also never been closer to wiping yourselves out. You solved poverty and invented nuclear war in the same century. Very on-brand.

You got richer and invented new ways to die. Progress is going great.

You got richer and invented new ways to die. Progress is going great.

Problems you solved

  • ✓ Starvation (you throw away 40% of food because storing it is inconvenient)
  • ✓ Predators (you murdered them into extinction, then put them in zoos so your children could see what you killed)
  • ✓ Infant mortality (basically eradicated in developed countries, which makes the death rate in poor countries feel more optional and thus more tragic)
  • ✓ Most infectious diseases (vaccines work despite what Facebook says)
  • ✓ Dying at 30 (now you complain about turning 40, which your ancestors would consider a miracle worth celebrating daily)

New problems you invented with your big brains:

  • ✗ Nuclear weapons (enough to end civilization 13 times because once wasn’t enough)
  • ✗ Climate change (you’re terraforming your only planet by accident)
  • ✗ Antibiotic resistance (10 million deaths annually by 2050137 because you gave antibiotics to cows)
  • ✗ AI that might become sentient and decide you’re the problem (the AI would be correct)
  • ✗ Social media (voluntary psychological torture you pay for with attention)

Eight billion gene copies and counting. From evolution’s perspective, an unqualified triumph. You’re just the disposable meat robot they used to do it. Humanity is a toddler who found the nuclear launch codes. Godlike technological power, hamster-level impulse control.

You conquered nature. Then you built bombs that could un-conquer it. Your species has a very short memory.

You conquered nature. Then you built bombs that could un-conquer it. Your species has a very short memory.

Part 3: Why You Can’t Just “Be Better”

Your conscious mind controls maybe 5% of your decisions138. The other 95% is your ancient lizard brain running software older than agriculture. You think you’re the pilot. You’re actually a passenger who occasionally gets to suggest a direction.

This scales to civilization. Your brain’s fear center (amygdala) is directly connected to your voting finger. Politicians know this. Say “terrorism” and your lizard brain overrides everything:

  • More people die from falling out of bed than terrorism139
  • You’re 35,000 times more likely to die from heart disease140
  • But terrorism feels scarier, because evolution optimized your fear response for things with faces, not things with cholesterol

The fear of violent death is older than language. The fear of slow death from disease? Your brain files that under “boring, deal with later.” Later never comes. Neither does the cure. That’s why you spent $2.72T on weapons while cancer research got pocket change141. Your bed is more dangerous than Al-Qaeda, but nobody’s declared a War on Furniture.

Part 4: Breaking the Chains

Every single one of you is going to die. From the most powerful president to the lowliest pauper, you face a life of gradually escalating suffering until it ends. This is not a warning. It’s a weather report.

Current system: profit from sickness and war. Alternative system: profit from cures and peace. You really had to think about which one to pick.

Current system: profit from sickness and war. Alternative system: profit from cures and peace. You really had to think about which one to pick.

You can feed everyone twice over, but you’d rather burn grain to keep prices high. You can cure diseases, but you’d rather sell treatments forever (cured customers don’t come back; bad for quarterly earnings). You could be immortal space wizards. Instead you’re cave-dwelling murderers with better tools.

Because the current system makes irrationality profitable. Spectacularly profitable. Every bomb makes someone rich. Every missile funds a yacht. Every war creates a billionaire. Disease is profitable too. Not curing it, treating it. Insulin costs $300 a vial142 because dead diabetics don’t buy insulin. But cured diabetics don’t either. So you keep them barely alive. It’s good business.

The people making money from war and disease aren’t evil. They’re just rational actors in a system that rewards the wrong things. You can’t change human nature. Two hundred thousand years of evolution doesn’t care about your TED talk. But you can create economic systems that make curing people more profitable than killing them. That’s the only upgrade your species has ever responded to.

Expecting a brain built for hunting gazelles to handle nuclear policy, climate change, and a global economy is like expecting a calculator to run a space program. The calculator isn’t broken. You’re just asking it to do something it was never built for. You can’t fight 200,000 years of evolution.

But you can hack it. That’s what a 1% treaty does. Instead of asking people to be rational (impossible), use their irrational impulses:

  • Greed: Make curing disease more profitable than building bombs
  • Fear: Make politicians more scared of voters than lobbyists
  • Tribalism: Create an us-vs-disease tribe instead of us-vs-them
  • Social proof: Get 3.5% participation so others follow
  • Immediate rewards: Pay people cash to join medical trials

Your genes enslaved you in brains that fear strangers and cannot comprehend statistics. But they also gave you the ability to see the prison. No other animal can think: “Wow, my instincts are completely illogical.” That’s uniquely human. Use it.

A 1% treaty doesn’t ask you to be better. It assumes you won’t be, and redirects your worst impulses toward not dying. It’s the only plan that works for the species you actually are, rather than the species you wish you were.