Genetic Slavery

Abstract
A Practical Guide: Get 500 Years of Clinical Research in 20, Avoid the Apocalypse, and Make Humanity Filthy Rich by Giving Papers
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

Your brain is 200,000 years old, living in a world that’s 200 years old, making decisions that will kill you in 20 years.

This is not a bug. It’s a feature. A terrible, murderous, diabetes-inducing feature.

The Selfish Gene Made You an Idiot (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.”

Translation: You’re a meat puppet controlled by chemicals that want to make more chemicals.

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. Now it’s why you’re fat, anxious, funding nuclear weapons, and slowly developing diabetes while your teeth fall out.

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

The Scarcity Brain (Or: Why You Can’t Stop Eating)

For 200,000 years, calories were rare. Finding a beehive wasn’t “prediabetes in a tree” - it was the difference between your children surviving winter or becoming the skinny corpses archaeologists find later.

So evolution programmed you with one simple rule: When you find calories, eat ALL of them RIGHT NOW before the hyenas show up.

Fast forward to 2025:

  • You live within walking distance of 14 restaurants selling 3,800-calorie meals
  • Each meal contains twice your daily calorie needs
  • Your ancient brain still screams: “EAT EVERYTHING! WINTER IS COMING!”
  • Winter never comes. Diabetes does.

The exact same brain that kept your ancestors alive by gorging on mammoth fat is now killing you with McDonald’s. Evolution doesn’t do software updates (it’s like still using Windows 95 to run nuclear power plants - technically functional, but nobody should be comfortable with this).

The Violence Module (Or: Why We Love Bombs More Than Band-Aids)

Fun fact: 15-30% of our ancestors died from violence. Not disease. Not starvation. Other humans smashing their heads with rocks over who gets the good berry bush.

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

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

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

  • Humanity spends $2.72T annually on weapons we’ll probably never use
  • 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 10,000 nuclear weapons are worried they don’t have enough

The violence module that kept your ancestors from getting clubbed to death is now building weapons that can end all life on Earth. This is what computer scientists call “feature creep.”

The Tribal Brain: Why Democracy is Broken

Dunbar’s number says humans can maintain stable relationships with about 150 people. That’s it. That’s your monkeysphere.

For 200,000 years, this worked great:

  • Your tribe had 150 people
  • You knew everyone personally
  • Decisions affected people you could see
  • Free riders got kicked out or starved

Now you live in a democracy with 335 million strangers where:

  • You vote for people you’ve never met
  • To make decisions about people you’ll never see
  • Using tax money that feels imaginary
  • To solve problems your brain literally cannot comprehend

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, 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 feels broken (because it requires superhuman empathy your monkey brain literally cannot produce)

Part 2: Genetic Slavery is Literally Killing Us

We’re Dying from Winning

Evolution prepared us for scarcity, predators, and violence. We got abundance, safety, and Netflix. Our bodies are experiencing the biological equivalent of “ERROR: SUCCESS NOT FOUND”:

What Evolution Prepared For What We Got Result
Starvation Unlimited calories 42.4% obesity rate
Constant physical threats Office chairs Anxiety disorders
30-year lifespan 80-year lifespan Bodies that fall apart at 40
Small tribes Global society Constant existential dread
Clear immediate dangers Abstract future risks Complete inability to plan
Scarce mates Dating apps Paralysis from too much choice

Your genes succeeded spectacularly. They made billions of copies. They won evolution.

You’re just the disposable meat robot they used to do it, and now you’re confused why you can’t stop eating Cheetos at 2 AM.

Living in the Stupidest Possible Timeline

Here’s the cosmic joke: Humanity has never been safer, healthier, or more prosperous. And you’ve never been closer to accidentally ending everything.

From my observations on Wishonia, this is the most entertaining timeline. You solved all the hard problems, then immediately invented new, stupider problems to replace them. It’s like watching someone win the lottery, then use the money to buy a tiger that eats them.

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 miraculous lifespan worth celebrating daily)

New problems you invented with your big brains:

  • ❌ Nuclear weapons (enough to end civilization 20 times because once wasn’t enough)
  • ❌ Climate change (you’re terraforming your only planet by accident)
  • ❌ Antibiotic resistance (10 million deaths annually by 2050 because you gave antibiotics to cows)
  • ❌ AI that might become sentient and decide you’re the problem (the AI would be correct - this is the risk of building things smarter than you)
  • ❌ Social media (voluntary psychological torture you pay for with attention)

You’re toddlers who found the nuclear launch codes. Godlike technological power, hamster-level impulse control.

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

Your Brain is Not Your Friend

People love to say “just make better choices.” These people are idiots.

Your conscious mind - the part reading this - controls maybe 5% of your decisions. The other 95% is your ancient lizard brain running software older than agriculture.

You can’t “choose” to not crave sugar any more than you can “choose” to not feel pain when stabbed. These systems run deeper than consciousness.

When you see a donut, here’s what happens:

  1. Ancient brain: “CALORIES! EAT NOW! SURVIVAL!”
  2. Modern brain: “I should eat healthy.”
  3. Ancient brain: “SHUT UP, FOOL! WINTER IS COMING!”
  4. Modern brain: “But I’m trying to lose…”
  5. You: [Eating the donut]

The ancient brain always wins. It has 200,000 years of practice.

The Pentagon’s Lizard Brain

The same thing happens at the civilization level.

When politicians allocate budgets:

  1. Lizard brain: “DANGER! BUILD WEAPONS! ENEMY TRIBES!”
  2. Rational brain: “We should fund medical research.”
  3. Lizard brain: “WEAPONS! NOW! OR EVERYONE DIES!”
  4. Rational brain: “But cancer is more likely to…”
  5. Congress: [Adds $50 billion to defense budget]

This isn’t corruption. It’s evolution.

The fear of violent death is older than language. The fear of slow death from disease? Your brain literally cannot process it the same way.

That’s why you spent $2.72T on weapons while cancer research got pocket change.

Part 4: The Prison We Built Ourselves

You Vote for Monkeys in Human-Skin Suits

Democracy asks your stone-age brain to make civilization-level decisions. It goes exactly as well as you’d expect (badly, the answer is badly).

You vote based on:

  • Who looks stronger (alpha male bias - your brain thinks the election is a wrestling match)
  • Who your tribe likes (social proof - 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: zero, but your brain insists this matters for nuclear policy decisions)

You don’t vote based on:

  • Complex policy analysis (too many words, brain hurts)
  • Long-term thinking (your brain stops caring after next winter)
  • Statistical reality (numbers are abstract, feelings are real)
  • Actual competence (boring, where’s the tribal signaling?)

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

The Military-Industrial Cortex

Your brain’s fear center (amygdala) is directly connected to your voting finger. Politicians know this.

Say “terrorism” and your lizard brain overrides everything:

So humans spend trillions on defense against threats that barely exist while ignoring the diseases actually killing them.

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just evolution doing what evolution does: optimizing for the wrong thing.

Part 5: Breaking the Chains

Every one of you, from the most powerful president to the lowliest pauper, is doomed to a life of gradually escalating suffering until it ends in catastrophe.

You are all prisoners to this moronic system. This system made sense in a world of scarcity when you were hitting each other with rocks over the last berry bush. Kill or be killed. Hoard or starve. Trust no one outside your tribe.

But now? You live in a world of abundance and nuclear weapons. 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). The software running human civilization is 10,000 years out of date, and the bugs are literally killing you.

Why don’t you update the software? Why do you cling to a system designed for cave-dwelling murderers when you could be immortal space wizards?

Because the current system makes idiocy more 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 vial because dead diabetics don’t buy insulin, but cured diabetics don’t either. So we keep them barely alive. It’s good business.

The people making money from war and disease aren’t evil. They just like money. You can’t change human nature, but you can create economic systems that make curing people more profitable than killing them.

Part 6: Breaking Free from Your Programming

The First Step: Admitting You’re Badly Designed

You’re not broken. You’re just running software designed for a different operating system.

Your brain evolved to:

  • Live 30 years (not 80)
  • Feed 5 people (not think about billions)
  • Avoid tigers (not understand statistics)
  • Survive winter (not plan for retirement)
  • Fight neighboring tribes (not prevent nuclear war)

Expecting your brain to naturally make good modern decisions is like expecting your cat to do your taxes. The hardware just isn’t there.

The Solution: Trick the Monkey Brain

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), you use their irrational impulses against them:

  • 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 everyone else follows
  • Immediate rewards: Pay people cash to join medical trials

You’re not trying to change human nature. You’re using human nature against itself.

The Meta-Slavery

Your genes have enslaved you in stupid brains, but they also gave you the ability to see the prison.

No other animal can think: “Wow, my instincts are idiotic.” That’s uniquely human.

You’re the only species on your planet that can:

  1. Recognize you’re badly programmed (self-awareness of bugs is step one)
  2. Design systems to work around your bad programming (debug without access to source code)
  3. Use your stupid impulses for smart outcomes (redirect, don’t resist)

You can’t change your nature. But you can build systems that make your worst impulses produce good results (judo for psychology).

The Problem With Your Brain

Your brain is a 200,000-year-old piece of software running on hardware that hasn’t been updated since you invented agriculture.

It wants you to:

  • Eat everything in sight (hello, diabetes)
  • Hoard resources forever (hello, billionaires)
  • Fear everyone different (hello, racism)
  • Build weapons obsessively (hello, nuclear arsenal)
  • Ignore long-term problems (hello, climate change)

This same brain is now in charge of nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence.

What could possibly go wrong?

The same evolution that made us stupid also made us smart enough to notice we’re stupid. And if we’re smart enough to see the prison, we’re smart enough to escape it.

You just have to stop pretending you’re rational and start building systems that work with your stupidity instead of against it.

A 1% treaty is that system. It doesn’t ask you to be better. It just redirects your worst impulses toward not dying.