Appendix p — 🧬 Genetic Slavery

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 design flaw. It’s a feature.

The Selfish Gene Made You an Idiot (And That Used to Be Smart)

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

Your genes don’t care if you’re happy. They don’t care if you’re healthy at 80. They care about one thing: making copies of themselves before something eats you.

For 99.9% of human history, this was a brilliant strategy. Now it’s why you’re fat, anxious, and funding nuclear weapons while your teeth fall out.

Part 1: Your Brain Was Designed for a World That No Longer Exists

The Scarcity Brain: Why You Can’t Stop Eating

For 200,000 years, calories were scarce. Finding a beehive full of honey wasn’t diabetes waiting to happen - it was the difference between your children living or starving to death next winter.

So evolution built you a brain with one rule: When you find calories, eat ALL of them. Now. Before the hyenas show up.

Fast forward to today:

  • You live next to 14 fast food restaurants
  • Each meal contains 3,800 available calories (twice what you need)
  • Your scarcity brain still screams: “EAT IT ALL! WINTER IS COMING!”
  • Winter never comes. But diabetes does.

The same brain that kept your ancestors alive by gorging on mammoth fat is now killing you with McDonald’s.

The Violence Module: Why We Love Bombs More Than Bandages

Here’s a fun fact: 15-30% of our ancestors died from violence. Not disease. Not starvation. Other humans bashing their heads in with rocks.

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

  • Assumed every stranger wanted to kill them (usually correct)
  • Struck first when threatened (survivor bias)
  • Formed tight groups to murder other groups (teamwork!)
  • Hoarded weapons obsessively (you can never have too many pointy sticks)

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

  • We spend $2.7 trillion on weapons we’ll probably never use
  • You instinctively distrust people who look different
  • Twitter feels like a war zone (your brain can’t tell the difference)
  • Countries with 10,000 nukes think they need 10,001

The violence module that kept your ancestors from getting clubbed to death is now building weapons that can end civilization. Progress!

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
  • Local corruption makes you angrier than trillion-dollar Pentagon waste
  • You’ll donate to save one sick child but ignore statistics about millions
  • Democracy feels broken (because it requires superhuman empathy)

Part 2: Genetic Slavery is Literally Killing Us

We’re Dying from Success

Evolution prepared us for scarcity, predators, and violence. We got abundance, safety, and Netflix. Our bodies are confused:

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. They made billions of copies. They won.

You’re just the disposable meat robot they used to do it.

The Stupidest Timeline

Here’s the cosmic joke: We’ve never been safer, healthier, or more prosperous. And we’ve never been closer to destroying ourselves.

We solved the problems that killed our ancestors:

  • ✅ Starvation (we have too much food)
  • ✅ Predators (we killed them all)
  • ✅ Infant mortality (basically solved)
  • ✅ Most infectious diseases (vaccines work)
  • ✅ Dying at 30 (now we complain about turning 40)

But our stone-age brains created new problems:

We’re like toddlers who found dad’s gun. We have godlike power and hamster-level wisdom.

Part 3: Why We 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 we spent $2.7 trillion on weapons while cancer research got pocket change.

Part 4: The Prison We Built Ourselves

We Vote for Monkeys in Suits

Democracy asks your stone-age brain to make civilization-level decisions. It goes exactly as well as you’d expect.

You vote based on:

  • Who looks stronger (alpha male bias)
  • Who your tribe likes (social proof)
  • Who makes you feel safe (fear sells)
  • Who you’d have a beer with (relevance: zero)

You don’t vote based on:

  • Complex policy analysis
  • Long-term thinking
  • Statistical reality
  • Actual competence

We elect leaders using the same brain circuits our ancestors used to pick the guy with the biggest club. Then we’re surprised when they act like it.

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 we spend trillions on defense against threats that barely exist while ignoring the diseases actually killing us.

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

We are all prisoners to this moronic system. This system made sense in a world of scarcity when we 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? We live in a world of abundance and nuclear weapons. We can feed everyone twice over, but we’d rather burn grain to keep prices high. We can cure diseases, but we’d rather sell treatments forever. The software running human civilization is 10,000 years out of date, and the bugs are literally killing us.

Why don’t we update the software? Why do we cling to a system designed for cave-dwelling murderers when we 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. We can’t change human nature, but we can create economic systems that make curing people more profitable than killing them.

Part 6: Breaking Free from Our Programming

The First Step: Admitting We’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 the 1% Treaty does. Instead of asking people to be rational (impossible), we 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

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

The Meta-Slavery

Here’s the beautiful irony: Our genes have enslaved us in stupid brains, but they also gave us the ability to see the prison.

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

We’re the only species that can:

  1. Recognize we’re badly programmed
  2. Design systems to work around our bad programming
  3. Use our stupid impulses for smart outcomes

We can’t change our nature. But we can build systems that make our worst impulses produce good results.

The Punchline

Your brain is a 200,000-year-old piece of software running on hardware that hasn’t been updated since we 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?

But here’s the thing: 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.

We just have to stop pretending we’re rational and start building systems that work with our stupidity instead of against it.

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