Historian here, all of history is stupid on one level or another.
- One of the most deadly wars in history happened because somebody believed he was Jesus’s brother.
- One of the largest ships ever built was built because the King of Scotland wanted to take Palestine back for Christendom.
- “OK” became a word because of 1830’s meme speak.
- A lot of Nazi ideology was underpinned by pseudoscientific woo like “Vril” energy and Atlantis.
- George Bush Jr baffled Jacques Chirac with a religious speil about Biblical prophecy and the antichrist so much that he called The French union of Protestants to figure out what the fuck he was on about, eventually they got a Theologian from Geneva to explain what the fuck was going on in American Christianity.
- Bin Laden believed The Twin Towers collapsing would instantly destroy the US economy to the point of collapse. Everyone told him that was a stupid assumption.
- Margaret Thatcher wanted to replace The British Train lines into London with Bus ways.
- The play that Lincoln was watching when he was shot was the 1860s equivalent of a stoner comedy.
- Empedocles, One of the earliest Greek philosophers believed he was a God, and tried to prove it by jumping into mount Etna.
- There was a moral panic over chess playing in the 1920s
History is full of stupid ideas and stupid people, some of them remain today.
I really enjoy this kind of “people have always been people” stuff (see also graffiti in Pompeii). Is there a good source for more of this kind of ridiculousness?
Not really, these are just things that I came across now and again.
If you want to know more…
- We have evidence of train surfing, where you ride on the outside of trains, from the 1890s.
- Making up fake quotes from famous smart people goes back a long way. Somebody wrote a story that claimed that John Herschel, son of Uranus discoverer William Herschel, and a polymath in his own right, had discovered life on the moon. The first John Herschel heard of this was when he read the story in the newspaper.
- For a while, radium was seen as a kind of cure-all so you had things like radium toothpaste and radium water. How much actual radium was in the products depended greatly. So people slapping the next best thing on everything didn’t just start with AI.
- When homoeopathy was invented, it originally required you taking the homoeopathic thing you just made and slapping it against the Bible. Homeopaths don’t usually mention that.
- Manchester once had a chief of police that was a Christian zealot who spent massive amounts of police resources and time going after lewd magazines and gay bars. During this time crime exploded in the city.
- The US navy spent massive amounts of resources looking for a woman in the Chicago area called Dorothy that they believed knew all the gay men in the navy. They believe that because they heard the phrase “are you a friend of Dorothy”, which was a way gay people asked if someone was gay. The Dorothy in question was Dorothy Gayle from The Wizard of Oz. The US navy spent resources looking for Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.
- People in pre-modern England believed that being touched by the king could cure illnesses.
- The reason why we believe that indigenous people thought that getting photographed would steal their soul wasn’t because they genuinely believed that, they understood the technology and the concept, with all of those native, people believe that those photos would be used against them, say, so the government could take their land. Manifest Destiny types just depicted them as believing the whole “soul” thing because they wanted to make them believe they were stupid and superstitious.
Brilliant. Like the previous list I knew some of these but others are new to me. Thank you!
I’m sure it’ll just gloss over everything like existing ones do.
Futurama would agree. I liked the Past-O-Rama episode.
bold to assume netflix will survive this time period
Let’s hope not
I doubt much of the world’s population will be able to watch Netflix at all 20 years from now. People still severely underestimate the ongoing climate catastrophe. Not for much longer though.
I would agree, but there’s a lot of stupid things that happened under Hitler that don’t get mentioned. We hear about WWII and the Holocaust and things directly adjacent to them, what happened in and around them, but we largely don’t hear about the ridiculous policies that happened during and going up to those times.