Human history, as a whole, is so depressing and meandering it’s a weird question to try and answer. Were the great empires a success, or a failure? It depends on if you’re measuring monuments built or social justice enacted, and if you’re comparing against modern polities or whatever shitty local warlord they replaced. History doesn’t really have an end goal, as much as we’d like it to.
Maybe you just meant a personal failure:
Thomas Midgley is one of my favourites, because he’s famous for three things: Inventing leaded gasoline, inventing ozone-destroying PCBs, and inventing the accessibility contraption that strangled Thomas Midgley. He did nothing else of note; he’s like the real Bloody Stupid Johnson.
Marathon is famous for running a long way just to deliver some news first, and then dying from exhaustion. People regularly make the same trip and are fine. He was regarded as a hero, and the races were originally in his honour, but I wouldn’t want to be him.
Muhammad II of Khwarazm received an envoy from Ghengis Khan, who wasn’t bent on invading at all but wanted trade, and decided to take their shit instead. Then he killed the people sent next to ask for a nice apology. You can guess where that went.
The Soviets once tried to sextort Indonesian quasi-communist leader Sukarno with a sex tape. It did not work, because he was shamelessly proud of his “virility”. In at least some tellings he misinterprets the KGB’s presentation as a gift, although I doubt he could have been that dumb.
If it’s the same person I’m thinking about he understood that it was blackmail but didn’t care. He requested copies of the tape to keep for himself.
“Thanks bro/comrade!” would be a great way to play this off diplomatically with someone you still want to be allies with, so that could be the origin of that bit.
Isn’t what we call a marathon just the last short leg of his journey, and he ran like 100-150 miles?
In addition to mixing up the man and the place, I got that wrong. Fixed.
The discovery of making and using fire.
Why
It’s the very beginning of the energy crisis. If we had never started fucking with fire, we wouldn’t have 90% or more of the world’s manmade problems.
Yeah we could argue about having mankind at all …
Pesky humans, we are our own worst enemy… ☹️
Having the intelligence to create technology but not enough intelligence to understand the implications.
The thing is technology is neutral. How we use it isnt.
we understand the implications, we just assume that the negatives will happen to others and that the positives will grant us a temporary reprieve in which to plug existing holes
Stuart Pearce of England’s missed penalty kick in the 1990 World Cup semi finals.
Humans.
Modern society. At the end 60s hippies were right after all…
letting unqualified businessmen rule the planet instead of experts in their given fields.
For me, this post is right under the person who said “Agriculture” and the response “Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?”
And if unqualified businessmen ruling instead of experts in their “given fields” isn’t a perfect way to describe feudalism, I don’t know if irony has survived.
The USA
Our collective response to climate change
I’m sure we’ve seen nothing yet
As far as effort? You’re right
And damage!
That’s right. We theorized the effects shortly after the first coal power plant, and we have observed the effects for a century now. Yet the response has been minimal, to say the least
large efforts are being made, its just not up to par with what people are expecting from their governments
Communism
deleted by creator
Me
Agriculture.
Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?
Ohh it’s much worse than that. Usually humans would live to around 60 if they survived infancy before that. Their diet was varied and since food was a limited resource, there was no way of population blasts. But agriculture just fucked it all up. We stopped moving around since the land needed constant maintainence and since the diet became mostly carbohydrates, combined with back breaking work, our life expectancy dropped to 40. We didn’t domesticate wheat, wheat domesticated us. It took modern medicine… ie 20th century to get the average life expectancy up again.
I recommend you read the book called Sapiens. It’s an eye opener.
I say we fucked up the moment we existed.
Fostering societal systems of greed and competition rather than of cooperation and compassion.
The problem with cooperation and compassion is that it literally takes one dick to ruin it. If we could incentivize the psychopaths in society to collaborate for their own good, then at least we’d strike a nice balance, but our economies aren’t structured that way.
A system that can be so easily destabilized is not a system that has planned for the long term. I think we’re slowly getting there, as even the dicks in society are beginning to realise that they can be shunned for their public actions, and that shunning does come with real financial consequences.
I just can’t subscribe to that idea. If it took 1 dick to ruin everything society would never have gotten off the ground in the first place. Hell, even today, our power grid pretty much operates off the principle of 'don’t be a dick and shoot this with the guns we all have" and it took MAGA craziness for people to attack them. I’d say compassion operates within any given system in spite of people being dicks and thats why we have prevailed the way we have.
You make a good point
This, we moved from Tribes to towns to cities to be more efficient but lost the cooperative aspect of the tribe which made it more efficient in the first place. Now corporations do market research until they figure out exactly what we can afford to get our needs met and then charge that price instead of anything related to their actual costs. It’s resulted in a situation to where most people live month to month and can’t afford vacation or even an unexpected car repair.
Thats me. My car, teeth, hair, and some parts of my rental house (thanks landlord) are falling apart and I can’t afford to fix any of it cause rent and bills are due each month and they keep going up. Its fucken madness, its making me insane.
Cheers from across the hellscape, friend.
Leaving the tide pools. Possibly even forming proteins to begin with. I much more enjoyed being stardust.
