Mean Girls Finish First—Because Nice Girls Let Them

In which Great Yu tames the rivers (and thereby prepares a way for the coming of Josef Stalin), a human species with smooth palms emerges for the first time, and Naram-Sin finally has the guts to declare what we all secretly feel

Nothing creates cynics like the study of history. By cynicism I don’t mean misanthropy, or any blanket denial of the possibility of positive  historical change. I mean a hardheaded acknowledgment of the harsh and unchanging realities of human power and human politics. This cynicism originates in the historian’s most basic material: written accounts of the things people did to each other and the reasons they gave for doing those things. If we reflect carefully on what is implied by the presence of historical records, four points unfold in neat origami sequence that serve to explain why historians are so predisposed to cynicism—or at least a rather hard-headed realism. It illuminates the world of agricultural civilization, a world where mean girls finish first—because nice girls let them.

1. Written accounts do not emerge until the advent of sedentary agricultural societies.

2. Sedentary agricultural societies concentrate power in the hands of great men and women.

 3. Great men and women are almost always bad men and women.

4. Great bad men and great bad women depend on structures of collective identity that are maintained by the hard work and obedience of small good men and small good women.

The first point is obvious and unarguable. Writing was born in sedentary agricultural societies—because these were the first societies with both the desire and the ability to support this curious activity. The desire came out of the need for record keeping—people now owned large amounts of stuff they could not carry on their person, and the ownership of this stuff was being transferred between greater numbers of people. The first Mesopotamian cuneiform is all about whose goat belongs to whom. The ability came out of specialization, as the food surplus generated by efficient agriculture created a nutritional margin able to support the un-calloused hands of a scribal class.

The second point is illustrated by an episode from the beginning of Chinese history: “Great Yu Tames the Rivers.” The episode is mythical, freeing its truth to take a much sharper edge than any collection of historical facts. Around 2300 BCE, the water god opened the heavens in anger, and the rivers flooded their banks, spreading chaos and destruction across the Middle Kingdom. King Shun ordered a remarkable man named Yu to bring the waters under control. Yu labored for thirteen years without stop, uniting all the tribes of China under his direction. With the help of the goddess Yao Ji, Yu cut a path through the Wushan mountains, allowing the excess water to flow into the sea. The immediate danger averted, Yu turned his attention to the future. He dredged the rivers and dug canals, ensuring that flooding would never again threaten the Middle Kingdom, and laying the foundations of irrigation agriculture. Yu’s story has been repeated in many places—in Mesopotamia, where kings left hundreds of inscriptions that bragged of restoring the canals that controlled the unpredictable Euphrates and kept the Fertile Crescent fertile—and in Egypt, where massed labor under centralized authority created the Great Pyramid almost three hundred years before Yu was supposedly born. After taming the rivers, Yu became known as Yu the Great, and king Shun passed authority to him on his death, founding the Xia dynasty. If you want civilization and its ambiguous fruits, you need men and women like Yu the Great.

The third point often creates a surprising amount of pushback, but is nevertheless true. The desire and the ability to achieve great power are nourished best by what is generally acknowledged as "evil". The desire emerges from insatiability—from the abyss of hunger, ambition, and contempt for human limits that the ancient Greeks called hubris. The first great conqueror in recorded human history—Sargon of Akkad—spent his entire life conquering “the four corners of the world” and keeping them beneath his heel. It’s hardly a surprise that his grandson and successor Naram-Sin, became the first person in recorded human history to claim divine status for himself. The social ziggurat of civilization—Naram-Sin’s and our own—is crowned by inhuman accumulations of material wealth and social power. Decent and reasonable people with a clear perspective on their own limitations generally achieve contentment on the ziggurat’s lower terraces. The person who feels the need to keep climbing, who will never be satisfied until he’s sitting at the top, is generally a narcissistic, a sociopath, a megalomaniac, or all three. 

People who get there in other ways—by accident or out of a genuine desire to effect positive change for its own sake—are the exception, not the rule. Even if we assume an equal number of altruists and sociopaths beginning the climb with their eyes on the summit, we can be pretty sure that almost every altruist will soon be tumbling down the lower terraces with a cracked skull. This is because the ability to accumulate wealth and power overlaps almost exactly with the habits and methods of the sociopath. Lack of empathy, insensitivity to risk, contempt for principles, a cold willingness to resort to violence, a keen sense for what people need to hear—it reads like an inventory of “Most Useful Traits” in Roman Imperial Aspirant or U.S. Presidential Candidate. If an altruist attempts to make the climb, she will generally fail to cut the throat of her deposed rival’s four-year old heir and shortly thereafter find herself sprawled at the bottom of the ziggurat, her eyes milking over as her brains pink the soil of the Fertile Crescent.    

The fourth point begins in the fact that a social ziggurat exists to be climbed in the first place. Ziggurats do not build themselves. They require remarkable feats of coordination and self-sacrifice—both in building and maintaining them. With respect to projects we no longer identify with, and cannot see ourselves making sacrifices for, our first instinct is to assume that they were created by force. This explains why the myth that the Great Pyramid was created by slave labor is still so popular. Who would drag granite blocks in the Egyptian heat just to ensure king Khufu’s successful ascent to the sun? Well, as it turns out, lots of people. Force is a blunt and inefficient instrument. The mace of Egypt’s conquering Scorpion King was soon replaced by the symbolic rod and flail of his successors, and they were plenty effective in convincing Egyptian peasants to work on Khufu’s pyramid during the off-season. Civilization uses beautiful stories to create collective identities that mobilize collective action. People fight and die over words that don’t have any physical referent. Alexandrian monks ripped Byzantine officials limb from limb for dividing the divine and human natures of Christ, American cobblers fell on British bayonets in the name of Liberty, and the sons of Russian peasants threw themselves beneath the treads of Nazi tanks for the sake of the Rodina. The daily bread of a functioning society is the empathy, self-sacrifice, and respect for principles of its individual cogs—their willingness to identify with something larger than themselves. 

And who benefited most from the self-sacrifice of Russian peasants? Josef Stalin, who crested the Soviet ziggurat on the strength of his calculating callousness and contempt for any principle but that of his own aggrandizement. Mean girls finish first—because nice girls let them.