My net takeaways from the rabbit-hole digression were:
- The Duggars are still neck-deep in IBLP with the Maxwells reaping the benefits of being 'independent' but hanging on the Duggar coattails.
- ALERT has quite a racket going for pseudo-military and emergency readiness training that people can get for cheaper with employable credentials closer to home. And of course, there is the option of joining the US military - but that's highly discouraged in CP/QF circles.
- I refuse to go on retreats that do not have any information available about the agenda ahead of time, Journey to the Heart organizers. Plus, the thought of people being flown into either of the two Chicago airports followed by a 6-7 hour van trip through scenic rural Wisconsin to end up in equally rural Watersmeet, Michigan makes me carsick by proxy. Flying into Minneapolis/St. Paul drops the drive time by at least an hour (and probably a lot more if you drive 60-70mph on rural roads like people do).
The Wisdom Booklets I've read generally have a misguided history section that I've ignored - but #24's section on why various empires fell is so egregiously horrible that I feel like I could take a shot at it. I don't have any official history credentials - but most of my casual reading is on historical topics. I think this one caught my attention because I've been re-reading Jared Diamond's "Collapse" which has a section on the collapse of one area of the Mayan civilization and I doubted that the ATI version would be anything like Diamond's take on the situation. (Spoiler alert: it isn't.)
I have one criticism or concern about Diamond's works. Like many popular science authors, his works start to make mistakes when he ventures into areas where he is not as as versed. For example, in "Collapse", Diamond explores human settlement and failure patterns throughout Oceania. It's a cool chapter - but he wrote it without learning the basics of island biogeography which is the study in biology of why islands support different species. This leads to a cringe-inducing paragraph where he states that no one knows why islands that are close to each other are less likely to lose all their forest plants than more widely spaced islands. For an evolutionary biologist like me, that's a head-slap moment. The widely accepted and demonstrated fact is that islands that are close together send more genetic information (read: seeds of timber palms) to each other than islands farther apart. In plain English, a palm tree makes floating nuts that can disperse to different islands if caught by a tide. The likelihood of a single palm nut making it to another island is based largely on the size of the island and the distance. A big, nearby island will catch a lot of palm nuts; a small, distant island will not.
Having gotten that out of my system, I need to be clear. If your options are teaching your kid using ATI Wisdom Booklet #24 or Diamond's "Collapse", use "Collapse". My concerns about "Collapse" are truly academic in that 99% of Americans will live happy, productive lives without ever caring about island biogeography - and that's great! Using your handy-dandy ATI Wisdom Booklets will teach your kid a bunch of racist lies that are palpably wrong when stated to anyone outside their cult.
The theme for "Why Empires Fall" is amazingly simple. Step one is that the people do something that annoysBill Gothard....I mean....God. Step two is that the empire falls because God has turned away from his people. Of course, making civilizations in the New World that did not have exposure to Abrahamic religions fit this mold takes some work - but mostly requires some creative editing of history and suspension of disbelief by readers.
I have one criticism or concern about Diamond's works. Like many popular science authors, his works start to make mistakes when he ventures into areas where he is not as as versed. For example, in "Collapse", Diamond explores human settlement and failure patterns throughout Oceania. It's a cool chapter - but he wrote it without learning the basics of island biogeography which is the study in biology of why islands support different species. This leads to a cringe-inducing paragraph where he states that no one knows why islands that are close to each other are less likely to lose all their forest plants than more widely spaced islands. For an evolutionary biologist like me, that's a head-slap moment. The widely accepted and demonstrated fact is that islands that are close together send more genetic information (read: seeds of timber palms) to each other than islands farther apart. In plain English, a palm tree makes floating nuts that can disperse to different islands if caught by a tide. The likelihood of a single palm nut making it to another island is based largely on the size of the island and the distance. A big, nearby island will catch a lot of palm nuts; a small, distant island will not.
Having gotten that out of my system, I need to be clear. If your options are teaching your kid using ATI Wisdom Booklet #24 or Diamond's "Collapse", use "Collapse". My concerns about "Collapse" are truly academic in that 99% of Americans will live happy, productive lives without ever caring about island biogeography - and that's great! Using your handy-dandy ATI Wisdom Booklets will teach your kid a bunch of racist lies that are palpably wrong when stated to anyone outside their cult.
The theme for "Why Empires Fall" is amazingly simple. Step one is that the people do something that annoys
The factual information on the skills and achievements of the Inca Empire take up one full column of a page in the ATI booklet. The information on their downfall takes up 2.5 pages.😖
Here's my crash course: the Inca pulled off some amazing architectural gems like Machu Picchu without wheels, without animal pulling power, without a written language, and without hardenable metals. Their masons were so skilled at dry-fitting stones that buildings have survived for centuries without mortar - and this is an earthquake prone area! The Inca people built terraces that greatly increased the amount of arable land in a mountainous area. At the same time, they incorporated irrigation into the design of the terraces. They built 25,000 miles of road that was passable for humans and pack animals. They created gorgeous textiles in llama, alpaca and vicuna wools. The Inca also figured out how to do trepanning procedures with an 80-90% survival rate thank in part to having coca plants and alcohol available for painkillers during the procedures.
I get the purpose of this next selection in connecting the fall of the Inca Empire to ATI's theme of "Displease God and Smiting Will Occur!" - but the implications are seriously weird:
Um....did ATI just admit that the Latter Day Saints of Jesus Christ were right that pre-Columbian civilizations were visited by Jesus and/or some of the Lost Tribes of Israel? That feels surprisingly broad minded for fundamentalist Christians.
Oh, wait.
The purpose of this tall tale is to quash any sympathy for the Incas who were crushed by Divine Wrath. We all know that it is not fair to hold people accountable for rules that they were unaware of - right? A merciful God wouldn't crush people who had no opportunity to be converted. But the Inca Empire did fall so clearly the solution must be that God sent some unknown missionaries to the Incas. Those missionaries converted some number of Inca but then the Inca went back to their previous religious beliefs and only left some pretty hymns. That feels more like fundamentalist thought patterns.
Another fundamentalist thought pattern: everything human that is beautiful must be derived directly from the Judeo-Christian Bible.
Now that we've denigrated their religion enough, the ATI authors dive into another favorite obsession: drugs!
Nope. There's no sign that the Inca peoples ever made cocaine - meaning the highly concentrated cocaine alkaloid illegal drug. Some areas did figure out that chewing coca leaves with some ashes (which are a base) would release more of the cocaine alkaloid - but there's a huge difference in strength between the amount of cocaine released by chewing on coca leaves or drinking coca tea compared to snorting cocaine or mainlining it. It's like comparing eating a poppy seed bagel to taking Oxycontin - palpably ridiculous.
The Inca Empire worked on a barter system with taxes paid through labor to the king. No one used coca beans as a currency any more than they used wool or ceramics or metals or labor.
So the Incas are now hopped-up on drugs after rejecting the Abrahamic God. The next quote combines Bill Gothard's hatred of sloth with a great slur on Catholic Spain.
There are so many things wrong with this.
Let's start with the Achilles' heel of the Inca Empire. The Inca Empire was greatly overextended for control by a government dependent on human foot speed. The Incas were not the first empire to have this problem or the last. The farther away from the seat of government the more likely local discontent is to spread into a rebellion. Having said that, the Inca Empire was doing pretty well prior to contact with Europeans in 1526.
In 1526, Pizarro and de Almagro contact the Inca Empire before returning to Spain in 1528 after political issues in Panama prevent them from launching another voyage. In the intervening 18 months, the Europeans had spread one or more contagious epidemic disease to the Incas that the Incas had no immunity to. These probably included smallpox and/or measles. Newly contacted populations have had documented losses of 90% of their pre-contact population after exposure to European diseases so it is safe to assume that the Inca Empire was dealing with the destabilizing influence of massive population loss. In approximately 1528, the Inca Emperor Huayna Capac died of one of those diseases. This lead to a civil war between two of his sons which ended right before the Pizarros showed up with the rest of the Conquistadors.
Yes, Francisco Pizarro captured Atahualpa Inka who had just put down his brother's rebellion and accepted a huge ransom. Francisco Pizarro was against the kangaroo trial that the Conquistadors held that found Atahualpa Inka guilty of killing his brother and plotting against the Conquistadors which lead to his execution. Actually, the trial and execution of a sitting king did not go over well in Europe when the news got back home. Monarchs had a long history of executing siblings who were traitors to the crown - and seriously - no one really expects people to not fight back against invaders. Ironically, Pizarro's objections were more pragmatic since there were a whole lot of Incas compared to very few Conquistadors so killing a very valuable hostage seemed like a recipe for disaster.
The Incas were easy prey? Tell that to the Conquistadors. It took over 50 years for the Inca Empire to be fully defeated. I'm not a military historian - but I do think that if the Incas has figured out how horrible horses did in mountain areas a bit sooner the Spaniards would have been failed invaders in spite of hardenable metals, horses, and better resistance to communicable diseases.
Historians don't have a way of qualifying the laziness of a given society but most pre-industrial societies required insane amounts of effort simply to stay alive so I'm gonna give the Inca a pass on this one.
If the authors are going to use child sacrifice as a touchstone for the downfall of the Inca Empire, they should get the details right.
Yes, the Incas practiced child sacrifice. The ages of the victims were between infancy and 16 years of age. The children were picked because they were exceptionally beautiful and without any scars or blemishes so that the people were giving the best children they had back to the gods. Based on isotopic evidence, the victims were fed very well for months to years prior to being killed. When it came time for the actual killing, the victims were fed a sedative potion that would knock them out before they were stabbed, strangled or left to die of hypothermia. The murder of children is never pleasant to think about - and based on the fact that the Incas drugged the kids so heavily - it seems like the Incas wanted their deaths to be as quick and painless as possible.
Europeans like to act morally superior - but at the same time there were massive amount of abandoned newborns left in dumps or wastelands when their parents couldn't support another child. The rationale was that the parents didn't actually kill the kids - and there was a chance that someone would rescue the child and raise them - so it wasn't technically murder. Newborns can be surprisingly robust - so the ATI should spend some time reflecting on the likelihood of newborns taking a few days to die without the benefit of cocaine.
Yes, the Incas practiced child sacrifice. The ages of the victims were between infancy and 16 years of age. The children were picked because they were exceptionally beautiful and without any scars or blemishes so that the people were giving the best children they had back to the gods. Based on isotopic evidence, the victims were fed very well for months to years prior to being killed. When it came time for the actual killing, the victims were fed a sedative potion that would knock them out before they were stabbed, strangled or left to die of hypothermia. The murder of children is never pleasant to think about - and based on the fact that the Incas drugged the kids so heavily - it seems like the Incas wanted their deaths to be as quick and painless as possible.
Europeans like to act morally superior - but at the same time there were massive amount of abandoned newborns left in dumps or wastelands when their parents couldn't support another child. The rationale was that the parents didn't actually kill the kids - and there was a chance that someone would rescue the child and raise them - so it wasn't technically murder. Newborns can be surprisingly robust - so the ATI should spend some time reflecting on the likelihood of newborns taking a few days to die without the benefit of cocaine.
The last sentence ends with "incest, cult prostitution, and other perversions."
The presence of incest in so many royal families is not related to lust; it's related to money and theology. Once a royal family becomes the living representation of the gods - or demi-gods - or actual gods, marriage partners become tricky to find. How can a god marry a mortal? Their kids would be less than divine - so the family starts marrying relatives. Genetically, humans can survive some inbreeding for a generation or two - but strict inbreeding creates more issues. The first genetic issue to crop up is often infertility issues. When marriage partners include a woman in her teens, the couple is likely to end up with a few kids even with subpar fertility - but this also means that the number of related marriage partners drops over time.
Before ATI members get too haughty, they should look carefully at the royal families of any European country. Everyone is pretty inbred. That inbreeding is part of the reason the royal families tend to be very wealthy. Marrying out of the family is good for breeding purposes, but terrible for wealth management since wealth keeps being diverted to outsiders.
In terms of cult prostitution, I'm curious what scholarly material that the ATI authors had access to that the rest of the world doesn't have. No one else seems to know about Inca cult prostitution.
The presence of incest in so many royal families is not related to lust; it's related to money and theology. Once a royal family becomes the living representation of the gods - or demi-gods - or actual gods, marriage partners become tricky to find. How can a god marry a mortal? Their kids would be less than divine - so the family starts marrying relatives. Genetically, humans can survive some inbreeding for a generation or two - but strict inbreeding creates more issues. The first genetic issue to crop up is often infertility issues. When marriage partners include a woman in her teens, the couple is likely to end up with a few kids even with subpar fertility - but this also means that the number of related marriage partners drops over time.
Before ATI members get too haughty, they should look carefully at the royal families of any European country. Everyone is pretty inbred. That inbreeding is part of the reason the royal families tend to be very wealthy. Marrying out of the family is good for breeding purposes, but terrible for wealth management since wealth keeps being diverted to outsiders.
In terms of cult prostitution, I'm curious what scholarly material that the ATI authors had access to that the rest of the world doesn't have. No one else seems to know about Inca cult prostitution.
Mmm-kay.
Inca textiles are simply amazing at the outset; they were so finely woven that the Inca treated them as treasures worth more than gold or silver. That kind of weaving takes a lot of work. So does preparing wool and spinning it. Remember, the Inca sheared vicunas! Vicunas are not domesticated because they require two different territories located at substantially different altitudes that they travel between daily for feeding and sleeping and go more than a little bonkers if these territories are denied. This means Incas were rounded up vicuna herds in the mountains, herding them into pens in the daytime territory, shearing them, and releasing the vicuna to return to the mountains without the help of horses or dogs! I'm tired just thinking about it.
No, the fall of the Inca Empire fits a more simple pattern.
European diseases --> depopulation stress and civil war --> conquest by Europeans. And even with those stresses, it took the Inca Empire over 50 years to fall. That's impressive in my book.
One final question: Am I the only person who thinks that photo makes more sense as a shot from a Monty Python skit?
Inca textiles are simply amazing at the outset; they were so finely woven that the Inca treated them as treasures worth more than gold or silver. That kind of weaving takes a lot of work. So does preparing wool and spinning it. Remember, the Inca sheared vicunas! Vicunas are not domesticated because they require two different territories located at substantially different altitudes that they travel between daily for feeding and sleeping and go more than a little bonkers if these territories are denied. This means Incas were rounded up vicuna herds in the mountains, herding them into pens in the daytime territory, shearing them, and releasing the vicuna to return to the mountains without the help of horses or dogs! I'm tired just thinking about it.
No, the fall of the Inca Empire fits a more simple pattern.
European diseases --> depopulation stress and civil war --> conquest by Europeans. And even with those stresses, it took the Inca Empire over 50 years to fall. That's impressive in my book.
One final question: Am I the only person who thinks that photo makes more sense as a shot from a Monty Python skit?
Well, Monty Python did say that coconuts are nonmigratory and they were wrong about that...
ReplyDeleteIn addition to the misinformation and racism, it's more than a little disturbing the way ATI extolls the virtues of poverty. I think extreme wealth isn't good for people, but poverty is terrible for overall mental and physical health. It's not about building character; it's about stability. They want their students to have lots of kids and also struggle financially and call it virtuous.
Or at least not question what the hell Gothard was thinking when he combined no birth control with no education and capped it off with a single income family....
DeleteFor every TV Duggar Family, there's 10 pre-TV Duggar families living in overcrowded homes without enough food.
History that's black and white and lacks both imagination and knowledge. These people's ideas are great for parody and nothing else.
ReplyDeleteSo much wrong... But about using coca beans as currency: I've heard it said that cocOa beans were used as a quasi-currency at certain times/places because everyone had an interest in them. The coca plant has berries, not beans. I can totally see this guy misreading in his greed for things that might make heathens look bad.
ReplyDeleteGood catch, Unknown! I think you are on the mark.
DeleteI'm actually curious about why they ignore the disease angle... if I remember correctly, there are plenty of plagues in the Bible, and wouldn't it make sense to argue that the Incas were struck down by a plague sent from God at their contact with the more "noble" Europeans?
ReplyDeleteAlso, lol at the description of the Inca people as lacking "integrity and principles" that comes literally one sentence after a discussion of Spanish kidnapping, ransom, and murder.
I think the reason the author held back was that the theme for this booklet was "Lust kills people". Because of that, they needed to drive home the angle that sexual immorality brings down empires - in spite of the fact that no sane historian has ever reached that conclusion.
DeleteAlso everybody knows that diseases are spread by viruses and bacteria. We don't need good to explain plagues. I think somehow he thought this explanation will seem more credible to his readers.
Delete@Minda - hold that thought on germ theory. Later in the same booklet, the health section covers sexually transmitted diseases in a way that makes me wonder how conversant some of his followers are in germ theory.
DeleteI'm with you on calling him out especially on accusing the Inca of laziness.
ReplyDeleteLook, having a lot of wealth then didn't mean your plants magically grow themselves. Or your buildings build themselves. Or your clothes weave themselves.
It's not like more money back then meant you could buy a Roomba to clean for you and Siri to have Amazon send a drone to your door with anything you could possibly need.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say life was still a crap-ton of work.
I'm so over the "my ancestors were better than other people's ancestors" attitude.
Exactly!
DeleteThat reminds me of a paper I read on food gathering by the Hadza people. Researchers didn't want to change the culture's approach to food-gathering by giving them gifts of food, so they gave gifts of items of clothing and beads.
No one seems to have thought about how freeing up the Hadza from the work of making thread/yarn/fabric/clothes when they don't have any domesticated wool producing animals or fiber plants or some types of jewelry affected the amount of time they had for food gathering.
When I grew a large vegetable garden during the summer months, I had time for food production and storage and that was it. I didn't have time for fabric production; that had to wait until winter even with modern conveniences like hardened steel knives, rototillers, Mason jars, pressure canners, pre-made yarn and sewing machines!
Yeah, someone really doesn´t understand that gold had hardly any *inherent* value until the arrival of computers and such. If you have enough to make all the jewelry you want, what are you going to do with the excess? Eat it? Having gold only makes you rich when other people want gold as well. But stating that might not go over well in the company of people who want you to be hoarding stuff for the apocalypse.
Delete@Unknown: But I've never understood why people would hoard gold bullion in case of the apocalypse since the practical value of gold in survival situations is zero. Doubly so when a society has collapsed to the point of needing massive personal food reserves - who will you trade the bullion to?
DeleteI've got to throw in my standard (possibly apocryphal) factoid that the Wizard of Oz is a parable about the dangers of using the gold or silver standard. A far more amusing take is Terry Prachett's "Making Money" which makes the sensible argument that human labor to create value is far more valuable and far more responsive to economic conditions than gold. His main character makes the sensible analogy that for a person on a deserted island a sack of potatoes has much more value than a sack of gold. You can eat potatoes - and with a little luck - the number of potatoes will increase over time.
Exactly my point. But if you're running in a crowd that makes money selling gold to preppers you're probably not allowed to say that out loud. You want the value of gold to be eternal - as unchanging as they want morality to be.
Delete