The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mankind

By Kendran Brooks

There was a time when man thought, he was the centre of the universe. Today we know better. The earth moves around the sun at a speed of one hundred thou-sand kilometres per hour. Our star system with its planets whirls around the centre of the Milky Way eight times as fast. And our home galaxy, in the midst of a whole bunch of other galaxies, races two million kilometres further through space every hour.
Mankind must have become dizzy because of this realisation. In any case, it seems that for quite some time lurching from one problem to the next. Orientation is needed. So is wise guidance and sensible goal setting.
This travel guide takes care of all that.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kendran Brooks
• Release date: Feb 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780463291177

Kendran Brooks

Kendran Brooks is the pseudonym of a Swiss author. He writes adventure novels and short stories. Born in Switzerland, he grew up in Switzerland, enjoyed his education in Switzerland, worked almost exclusively in Switzerland and still lives in Switzerland today. First a businessman, then an accounting expert, he became self-employed as a management consultant in information technology, working for various international corporations. A few years ago, he retired from professional life and turned to writing. Now in his fifties, he is plagued by the usual ailments. Thinning hair, waist fat and galloping curmudgeonliness. He took his motto for life from the novel The Country Doctor by Honoré de Balzac: »Talking about useful things costs me no more than talking about superfluous stuff.«

Book preview

Kendran Brooks

The Hitchhiker’s Guide

to the Mankind

The Answer to the ultimate Question of

Life, the Universe and Everything

Copyright © Kendran Brooks

Cover picture: Arek Socha, Pixabay

Cover illustration: Kendran Brooks

Smashwords Edition

Table of Content

Please board

The four diseases of humanity

The animal called man

A really short history of mankind

It's the fault of those who rely on him

Are you already or are you still thinking?

Well, you cultural philistine!

Real justice or rather revenge

Which pig would you like?

We are honestly sorry

Would you like a little more?

I told you!

Case study Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2

Still unhappy?

Who is afraid of the big bad wolf?

We force us ourselves

The truth is always a lie

Economy finally explained comprehensively

Money is not equal to money

Cheers to the economy

The Capital - in the 19th and 21st century

Knowledge is power

Climate change

There is nothing like civil society

42 Responses

Visions - Utopias - Dystopias

There was a time when man thought,

he was the centre of the universe.

Today we know better.

The earth moves around the sun at a speed of one hundred thousand kilometres per hour. Our star system with its planets whirls around the centre of the Milky Way eight times as fast. And our home galaxy, in the midst of a whole bunch of other galaxies, races two million kilometres further through space every hour.

Mankind must have become dizzy because of this realisation.

In any case, it seems that for quite some time

lurching from one problem to the next.

Orientation is needed.

So is wise guidance and sensible goal setting.

This travel guide takes care of all that.

The author

Kendran Brooks is the pseudonym of the Swiss author Rolf Rothacher. He writes adventure novels and short stories. Born in Switzerland, he grew up in Switzerland, enjoyed his education in Switzerland, worked almost exclusively in Switzerland and still lives in Switzerland today. First a businessman, then an accounting expert, he became self-employed as a management consultant in information technology, working for various international corporations. A few years ago, he retired from professional life and turned to writing. Now in his fifties, he is plagued by the usual ailments. Thinning hair, waist fat and galloping curmudgeonliness. He took his motto for life from the novel The Country Doctor by Honoré de Balzac: »Talking about useful things costs me no more than talking about superfluous stuff.«

The book

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mankind came into being over the course of the last thirty years, without intention or plan. Which probably explains the long duration. But the content of the guidebook is so enormous, not to say violent, that we had to chew long time on the material.

The book is not an individual achievement but was created in a loose and close exchange with more than a dozen experts, including physicians, economists, philosophers and sociologists. Their impressions and insights flowed into the travel guide just as much as the knowledge of a wide range of non-fiction authors.

That is why the book is published under the author's pseudonym and does not include a long list of contributors, who in some cases are unaware of their involvement.

The head is round,

so that thinking can change direction

Francis-Marie Martinez Picabia (1879 - 1953)

French writer, painter and graphic artist

Please board

Congratulations on purchasing this guidebook with the meaningful and appropriate title The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mankind. Our guidebook will accompany you from today onwards on all further paths in life and lead you safely through any turbulence, no matter how great. With its help, you will save yourself many detours and happily avoid most of the bottlenecks and dead ends that life constantly has in store for us.

Our journeys together to the mankind will explain, simplify and change your view of life to such an extent that you will soon be rubbing your eyes in wonder and asking yourself how you ever got along without the travel guide.

*

Our journeys together take us to all the decisive stations of Homo Sapiens. They are all places that mankind created with a loose hand and a sparkling spirit over the last millennia and keeps in constant operation today. Most of these places will seem familiar to you. In some cases, you will even think you know everything about them. But make no mistake. Deciphering Homo Sapiens, making it explainable and thus comprehensible to us, is a complex undertaking.

To make our task easier, the guidebook has unusual twists and whimsical shortcuts in store for us. We look at Homo Sapiens from new angles and link things together that were previously loosely in front of us. Some new impressions will fire your imagination. Others will trigger vexation in you. After all, we humans are the product of a great deal of half-knowledge and even more emotions. As the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein once said so aptly. »Common sense is only an accumulation of prejudices acquired by the age of 18.« But don't worry. Our guidebook will never let you stray from the right path and will lead you safely to each new destination. Even though modern man is known to suffer from four serious diseases against which there seems to be hardly any cure in the long run.

Inaccuracies in language make any common understanding difficult. At the same time, too much attention to detail obstructs our view of the essential. A poor memory makes us commit the same mistakes repeatedly. In addition, a pronounced ignorance prevents many meaningful transactions in our lives.

The guide finds effective remedies for each of the four diseases thanks to clear announcements and structures. Over the course of the next few weeks, it will become your personal companion, advising and reassuring you wherever you have felt harassed or threatened by your environment, where you have feared getting bogged down or lost.

*

What you learn in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mankind is never mindless knowledge, as you were taught in school or as reference books try to explain to you. Our travel guide works solely with insights. The difference to simple knowledge lies in the growing ability of every reader to find his or her way independently and ever more quickly in every situation in life and to deal with all questions much more precisely than before. Knowledge basically works like yes or no, zero or one, white or black. Insights, on the other hand, allows us to discover, fathom and classify all the other answers, numbers and colours.

At the end of our journey, you will see humanity, but also your environment, even your own person through different eyes. In the future, you will be able to respond much more calmly to the artificial excitements of modern life, always keeping your perspective even where chaos used to reign. In this way you will find for yourself the inner peace that many are looking for, but so far only a few have been able to find.

But as a Hitchhiker to the Mankind, you not only learn to understand the whole humanity. You will finally realise why your last marriage fell apart. You will also discover the true meaning of life and possibly find happiness in your life after all. We will also banish your headaches for all time and without any side effects, even take care of all your compulsions and routines, as well as all your unfounded fears. Even the thought of your own death, unbearable for many people until now, will have lost all horror for you after reading the guidebook.

Promised much? Of course. Too much promised? Read and judge for yourself.

*

There are still some questions we need to clarify before we start our journey together. Why are we being so modest and hitchhiking? Why don't we get behind the steering wheel of our own vehicle? Wouldn't that be a quicker and more purposeful way to travel? Hitchhikers, however, do enjoy some advantages. You can sit comfortably and look around at your leisure while driving to the next place. Without effort or distraction, hitchhikers discover many new and useful things. Drivers, on the other hand, must spend most of their time paying attention to the traffic and the rest of the environment. Inevitably, you miss out on valuable or even decisive things. As hitchhikers, we are also forced to be curious and to remain tolerant. Those who are unable to put aside their views and prejudices will not find a suitable vehicle. Only as hitchhikers do we develop the necessary humility to approach humanity without reservation. Moreover, as hitchhikers we must always maintain a certain willingness to take risks within ourselves, to constantly adjust to new situations. This is how we learn to endure moments of uncertainty or fear. »To be open minded« is indispensable for our journey to the mankind. For we will stumble upon many facts about which you have so far developed no idea, only a vague idea or a completely wrong idea. But beware. The travel guide is not aimed at superficial readers who expect books to have a high entertainment value above all. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mankind is primarily aimed at those adventurers who really want to look behind the riddles of Homo Sapiens.

So, let's set off together. But please with as little luggage as possible. Because the more you carry in your backpack at the beginning of our journey, the slower we will progress and the more quickly we will tire. The less biased you are in following the explanations and the more willing you are to question previous views, the more purposeful the guide will work for you. Leave all the ballast you have accumulated during your life at home. It will only hinder you on our excursions to the places of humanity's activity.

At this point we would like to issue an urgent warning to all those who are always trying to make their lives as easy as possible. This guide is not a holy book full of commandments and prohibitions to which you can submit. Nor does it contain any fixed ideologies, let alone a universal philosophy that you can blindly follow. Instead, our answers interweave themselves with your previous experiences. From this, a very individual understanding of humanity develops in you that corresponds to your personality. For the goal of our efforts is by no means uniformity of thought or even a uniform, forced understanding about the human world. If you are looking for something like that, you are better off with the religions or with the philosophy. What we will find on our excursions together is a wide range of ideas and thoughts, a growing bouquet of well-founded opinions and personal perspectives. For Homo Sapiens must wither and die out if he were ever to lose his individuality.

*

We must point out another special feature of our guidebook at this point. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mankind often draws on examples from the western industrialised nations. This is by no means intended as a devaluation of the remaining eighty-five percent of Homo Sapiens on earth. But the fact is that in matters of politics, science, economics, sport or art, almost the entire world is currently ticking along the way these human activities have developed in Europe and America over the last two hundred years. You are not convinced of that? Well then. Get in for a first time and sit down comfortably.

Worldwide, we almost only use the Christian calendar. We have globally harmonised most measurements (lengths, weights, etc.), with only the industrialised West providing the specifications. Even higher mathematics, which spilled over from India via the Middle East to Europe a thousand years ago, was only further developed in the West and installed as universally valid for scientifically explanations.

What does the guidebook mean by the last, somewhat cranky sentence?

Everything that can be correctly described with the help of mathematics is comprehensible to any knowledgeable third party and thus also verifiable. But everything that is beyond the reach of mathematics can always be questioned and doubted by other people. That is why Homo Sapiens agrees worldwide in matters of physics, chemistry, astronomy, geography or geology, while mankind has still not been able to find generally valid answers accepted by all peoples and nations for things like sociology, psychology, politics or economics.

Everything clear? If not, please read the last section again. In general, no one should be ashamed to read the same text a second time after finishing a chapter. This is not a speed-reading competition.

Another argument for the leadership of Western industrialised countries can be found in the global organisations. Whether we speak of the UN, the OECD, the WTO, the G-7, the G-20, the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. They all go back to ideas and initiatives of the Christian, industrialised nations. That is why they provide the guidebook with a lot of illustrative material.

From time to time we will refer to Switzerland, with its mere 8.6 million inhabitants (as of 2020), to illuminate and describe certain conditions and developments. Why can such a tiny country serve as an example for humanity? Well, the Swiss Confederation, as the country is officially called, has many useful features in store for our purposes.

Switzerland is a republic and at the same time the only country on earth with a direct democracy. In this Alpine country, it is always the citizens who decide on all laws and international treaties, not elected politicians, monarchs or dictators. Swiss citizens are also allowed to change their constitution at any time by collecting signatures and voting. In this way, the people repeatedly dictate to their politicians the direction in which the country should fundamentally develop. Swiss citizens also decide on the types and amounts of all taxes and duties. Direct democracy is also effective at all three political levels of the country, i.e., in the municipalities, in the member states and in the superordinate federal state. Thanks to the direct influence of citizens on the organisation and ideology of the country, we can observe and study many political and social processes in a more targeted manner in small Switzerland than in countries with other forms of rule.

Switzerland is also a highly international country. Almost forty percent of the permanent resident population has a migration background. One in four of them has acquired citizenship in the meantime, participates in all elections and votes, just like the ten percent of Swiss who live permanently abroad. Thus in this federalist, direct-democratic Alpine republic, we find an exceedingly colourful bouquet of views and intentions, wishes and goals, all of which can express themselves directly and bluntly politically and publicly.

We recognise the importance of small Switzerland in the world by the many international organisations that have set up their headquarters in the Alpine republic. The UN is represented by the WHO, the UNHCR and the ILO, among others. The WTO, the ICRC, the WEF, the IOC and WADA, the WWF and BIS, the UPU, FIFA, UEFA and not to forget CERN and the Club of Rome are probably the best known among many other important institutes and institutions.

Language diversity is also remarkable in this tiny nation. German, French, Italian and the folkloric Councillor Romansh have long been among the four national and official languages. But English has also long been an integral part of the daily lives of many Swiss, thanks to the tourism that began a hundred and fifty years ago. Through immigration, the world languages Spanish and Portuguese are also strongly represented. Especially in the age of advancing globalisation, we can use Switzerland as a real microcosm for our investigations. Here, experience has been gained and developments have been made that are still pending in other countries and will only be mastered in the future. In the process, Switzerland has almost always managed to bring the most diverse needs of a constantly growing mixture of peoples under a single, decidedly peaceful hat. And it has done so for over one hundred and seventy years. We Hitchhikers to the Mankind can only benefit from all this experience.

*

Some readers may now wonder whether they even have the necessary expertise to find their way through the immense jungle of humanity. We can reassure you in this respect. For example, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci already wrote, meaningfully and quite rightly: »All men are intellectuals, even if not all men perform this function in society.« The German poet and naturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also unconsciously held his protective hand over the readers of this guidebook when he said: »Everything clever has already been thought, you only must try to think it again.« And we close out the last doubts with a bon mot of the American writer Mark Twain: »When we consider that we are all mad, life is explained.« You see, nothing can prevent us from succeeding in unravelling humanity.

Like any expert who becomes an ignoramus as soon as he leaves his field of specialisation, we too will proceed in a decidedly amateurish manner. But wherever our investigations go beyond average education, we explain the circumstances in detail. We also dispense with most foreign words. They serve the specialists of this world primarily to confuse their listeners and to present themselves as particularly competent.

*

As after every trip, we will have a lot to tell the people back home. The »aha« moments will certainly be in the foreground. But we will also have many an yuck story to tell. After all, we humans are all individualists with our own personal views, goals and wishes. We are neither a homogenous race of ants nor a flock of sheep, even if some politicians or rulers like to see us that way and often enough try to treat us that way. As Robert Palmer sang back in 1978:

It takes every kind of people

To make what life's about

Every kind of people

To make the world go 'round

Among the living beings on our planet, Homo Sapiens stands out for his high urge for individuality and self-realisation, for his bizarre ideas, wild dreams, entrenched opinions and unclear needs. We will not let anyone deny or dispute these abilities in the future.

The four diseases of mankind

Let's start with the treatment of the four evils that Homo Sapiens has probably had to deal with since the beginning.

Any imprecision in language leads to misunderstandings. We recognise the problem in buzzwords like culture or justice. What exactly do they imply? Every person develops his or her own views on this. Even experts usually get into arguments when they are supposed to find a universal, all-encompassing answer for such terms. They simply fail because of the task at hand because a consensus among a lot of individuals is often impossible. Do you remember? Only what can be proven with the help of mathematics can be comprehended by third parties and accepted without any doubt.

Our guidebook describes the terms that are important to us clearly and conclusively, albeit often in its own idiosyncratic way that may be difficult for you to digest. But our intention is not to find globally accepted explanations. That is just as impossible for us as it is for all experts. All we want is for the readers of our travel guide to understand each other and to be able to exchange ideas. We do not make any further demands on our explanations. Please do not cling to descriptions to the contrary that you find on the internet, in non-fiction books or buried in one of your cerebral convolutions. For we are not concerned with scientific exactness, which is questioned by any side anyway. Our goal is solely the development of a common basis of understanding among all Hitchhikers to the Mankind.

The sciences are overrated anyway. Far too often, their supposedly assured findings turn out to be wrong, incomplete or irrelevant. Moreover, rarely do two experts agree on the same topic in their field. Moreover, science, with all its currents and opinions, hypotheses and diagnoses, is increasingly becoming a matter of pure faith. Do you disagree? Do you trust the experts of this world? Then a few clarifying examples are probably in order.

Theoretical physics has not yet (as of 2020) been able to agree on either string theory or loop quantum gravity. Both models, however, pursue completely different approaches to linking Max Plank's quantum mechanics with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Although there are insurmountable contradictions between the two theories, thousands of physicists nevertheless live quite well from their disagreement and thus taken to its logical conclusion, from their complete ignorance.

Or let's take the age of the Earth. In the 19th century, theoretical physics assumed 20 to 100 million years due to the size of our planet and the expected cooling. At that time, nothing was known about the processes in the internal structure of the Earth that ensure a constant supply of heat. However, geologists disagreed. Based on their observations, they assumed a much older age. Charles Darwin also pointed out that, in his opinion, the chalk cliffs of Dover had taken at least three hundred million years to form. From 1862 onwards, a bitter dispute raged between theoretical physics, geology and other scientific disciplines over the sovereignty of interpretation. In the end, theoretical physics decided the expert competition in its favour. For the later Lord Kelvin had calculated the age of the Earth with mathematical precision at 24.1 million years. From 1903 onwards, the Earth was therefore considered to be exactly that old, scientifically founded and proven beyond doubt by mathematics. Lord Kelvin died in 1907 still believing in the accuracy of his calculations. But in 1911, with the help of the natural uranium-lead decay series, the geologist Arthur Holmes dated the beginning of the Cambrian, a long-ago age of the Earth, at 600 million years. A little later, Holmes had already analysed rock samples with an age of 1.5 billion years. In the end, the geologists, with the kind help of experimental physics, prevailed over the theoretical physicists with their completely wrong assumptions and meaningless calculations. Is it possible that Sheldon Cooper, the theoretical physicist in the US sitcom The Big Bang Theory, is so unhappy with geology because of this early defeat of his profession? Let us remember at this point:

Even exact mathematical calculations with sophisticated

calculation models and formulas do not always lead to valuable

findings. If they are based on incomplete data,

and they always do, the result can be

turn out to be completely wrong.

But since we are discussing scientific mistakes, here is another amusing story. Because geology clearly got off too lightly in the previous example. In 1915, Albert Wegener published the theory of continental drift. He had developed his thesis based on coastal forms, gemstone deposits and the discovery of fossils in Africa and South America. The experts, however, laughed at the man. For Wegener was not a graduate geologist, but a meteorologist, polar and geoscientist, and thus by no means technically competent to make such statements. The land bridge hypothesis between Africa and South America, favoured by most geologists at the time, had to be dropped, however, after a German research ship had thoroughly but unsuccessfully searched the seabed between the two continents by echo sounder from 1924 to 1927 for the presumed, long-sunken land connections. Nevertheless, Wegener's 1915 theory of continental drift was not recognised as the only correct one until plate tectonics research began in the 1960s. Let's remember this as a Hitchhiker to the Mankind:

Even the crudest mistakes in science can turn out to be

for many decades at the head of the supposedly

of humanity's established insights.

H.G. Wells wrote as early as 1895 in his book The Visit: »Explanations are the fallacies of a scientific age.« Let us remember, whenever we must do with science, the possibility of its complete failure. Even if most scientists subscribe to a unified opinion and fight or ridicule all other hypotheses, it does not mean that they are right.

Totalitarianism and science are mutually exclusive.

Galileo Galilei also had to experience this at the time. However, in a completely different way than scholastic wisdom still tries to teach us today. The Italian astronomer copied the telescope developed in the Netherlands and passed it off as his own invention. When his employer found out about this fraud, he cut Galileo's previously increased salary. The Italian astronomer thought he had found irrefutable proof of Copernicus' heliocentric view of the world. As a result, he made fun of the Bible, but especially of the Pope in several of his writings. But not everything Galileo Galilei advocated so vehemently corresponded to the truth. In 1610, he published a drawing of the moon's surface. On it, a large crater is inscribed that never existed. Until the end of his life in 1642, he also believed that the planets moved in circular orbits around the sun. Yet the German mathematician Johannes Kepler had already proven elliptical orbits in 1611. Galileo also claimed that the tides depended on the sun, although astronomers of the time had long since recognised that the tides were stimulated by the moon's gravitational pull. But neither his astronomical errors nor his insults against the Pope and the Church were the Italian's undoing. It was only his stubborn bossiness that brought him down. For his fiery fight against the Ptolemaic world view of the Bible was in sharp contrast to the views of the two reformers Luther and Calvin. They had already strongly condemned Copernicus' hypotheses in the 16th century, calling them blasphemy and heresy. But the Pope, always patient and tolerant towards Galileo Galilei, increasingly came under suspicion of doubting the Bible himself. It was mainly for this reason that he used the Inquisition against the Italian astronomer in 1632. Galileo Galilei, however, suffered neither imprisonment nor torture. During the months of the judicial investigation, he lived most of the time in the Florentine embassy, spent only a few days in the palace of the Inquisition, occupied several rooms there together with his servant, continued to be supplied from the Florentine embassy kitchen, which was one of the best in Rome. His punishment basically consisted of declaring that he did not have the only possible truth, but that other hypotheses were and remained possible. In addition, he was banned from any teaching activity for life.

Today, Catholicism is often said to be hostile to science. It should be mentioned that the Bible-denier Galileo Galilei was virtually thrown into university chairs in Roman Catholic Italy. He also received six private audiences with the Pope. Johannes Kepler, on the other hand, in Protestant Tübingen, never stood a chance of getting a professorship. At the University of Salamanca in Spain, an arch-Catholic country, astronomy was taught from 1561 onwards according to the biblical Ptolemy variant and according to Copernicus' heliocentric world view. The students were supposed to learn about both hypotheses. The Catholic inquisitor Robert Bellarmin stated as early as 1606 that every scientific assertion must always remain hypothesis. For even the most convincing proof of the correctness of a doctrinal proposition can never completely exclude all other lines of thought. For this reason alone, the Catholic Church had to act against Galileo Galilei's stubborn, opinionated and thus ultimately unscientific attitude. However, when the French physicist Pierre Duhem said in 1908 that in the trial against Galileo Galilei, scientific logic had stood where it still stands, namely on the side of the Inquisition, he was almost lynched by his professional colleagues. But the American philosopher Karl Popper later made it just as clear that there must be no totalitarianism in science. And the Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend rightly said in 1976: »The Church of Galileo's time adhered much more closely to reason than Galileo himself, and it also considered the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teachings. Their judgement against Galileo was rational and just, and his revision can only be justified politically-opportunistically.«

You see, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is right in this case too. »Everything clever has already been thought, you only must try to think it again.« Science means thinking about the same questions again and again and finding and accepting new ways of solving them.

*

Let us now turn to the second disease of humanity, the fragmented of the big things. As soon as we dig a little deeper in one area of life, we more and more often come up against enormous complexity. The economy clearly shows us this with its division of labour. If we look at the production chain of a passenger aircraft from the extraction of raw materials to the delivery of the aircraft, several dozen countries and thousands of companies are involved in accomplishing this one task. Complexity therefore seems to be the order of the day.

Or let's take the sciences (again?). They are bogged down in such many individual disciplines that not even Wikipedia can list them all. We have become decidedly small-minded in all great matters. This is certainly due to the diversity and depth of human knowledge that we have been able to acquire. But the more fragmented we are in our search for new knowledge, the more likely we are to lose all overview and fail to recognise important connections. Or we get lost in insignificant partial aspects. This is the experience of many chronically ill people who rush from specialist to specialist with their ailment without ever experiencing relief or healing. The medical knowledge seems to be there. But it is far too fragmented to be used successfully all the time.

Although human knowledge continues to increase, we understand the world less and less. Simplifications are urgently needed. And they are indeed possible. Even if experts and politicians like to tell us otherwise.

Expertism is the real reason why we are getting more and more bogged down and losing track of things. Because the power of all experts lies in their small-mindedness. By desire, every expert creates a precisely defined, usually tiny field of activity for himself. He works on this area with great energy and passion. He resembles a pensioner in his allotment garden. Every morning he carefully wipes the dew off each growing tomato. But unlike the mini farmer in the suburbs, experts must be able to make a living from their micro-professional plot. That's why they tend, nurture, fertilise and weed their tiny plot to excess, defending it against all the other allotment gardeners around, but also against all the weeds and pests that challenge their harvest.

Any simplification makes life more difficult for experts in the long term and threatens their work and livelihood. That is why they are against any simplification for existential reasons alone.

But let's be clear. This fight about the details is the good right of all experts. Every person should stand up for their concerns and interests with all their possibilities. Experts are also necessary in order to develop more and more knowledge and to arrive at even deeper insights. For only on this basis, thanks to implementation in technology and the economy, can we steadily advance prosperity and thus also welfare as great achievements of humanity. But let us always remember. A geologist used experimental physics to expose the gross fallacy of theoretical physics. And a meteorologist corrected the fallacies of the geologists. Albert Einstein developed one of the most important mathematical formulas of mankind within the framework of his special theory of relativity. E = m · c². But Einstein was not a mathematician, he was a theoretical physicist. Years later he said laconically: »Since the mathematicians have fallen over the theory of relativity, I no longer understand it myself.«

The usefulness of expertise is generally overestimated today and wrongly regarded as the only valid one. For it is precisely in those areas in which mathematics is of little use for explanation, i.e., in sociology, politics, economics, religions or art, to name a few examples, that all experts are first and foremost the developers of theses and the defenders of their personal opinions and by no means infallible researchers who could tell us eternally valid truths. In many areas of knowledge, however, in which mathematics is fundamentally applicable, we lack the completeness of data to be able to provide incontrovertible proof. If we give the experts of this world too much space and time, their efforts can even slow down the development of new knowledge. Especially when it comes to answering the big questions of humanity on which politicians also take their positions. Instead of regaining the overview with the help of experts, we listen uncomprehendingly to their trench warfare or are slain by millions of published inanities.

Later in the book we will occasionally encounter situations in which we realise that further refinement of things does not lead to more clarity and deeper insight, but merely adds to the complexity and thus to the confusion. Let's keep the overview together. Otherwise, we might end up like Henry Thomas Buckle, the creator of the History of Civilisation in England. The first volume of his planned trilogy was published in June 1857. Buckle contracted actual cerebral palsy a little later while preparing the second volume. He had tried in vain to analyse thousands of 17th and 18th century Scottish sermons. Nothing like that will happen to us in this guide. We keep the overview and don't get bogged down.

*

Our forgetfulness is the third stumbling block on our way to understanding the crucial processes within humanity and relating them to each other. For most of the things that continue to make up Homo Sapiens lie so far in the past that there are no secure records of their origins. Who invented the wheel? And for what purpose? To run a rope over it and lift a load? Or to build a first vehicle? Who invented the smelting of copper ore? Have developed later bronze casting? Improved the furnace technology for smelting iron ore? We don't know and probably never will. But this is also not necessary for our endeavour to grasp and understand the present life and work of Homo Sapiens as a whole. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mankind cares little about the beginnings. Instead, we are interested in the mechanics behind everything. And for that we don't need to know the origins at all but may rely on the current movements.

The travel guide combats our natural forgetfulness primarily by means of cross-comparisons. In this way, the decisive things link up with each other, creating strong, memorable networks in us. As a reader, always remain open to the completely new, the unexpected, but also to the downright weird. Even if you don't know what to do with it at the beginning. Always wait and see where the journey takes you before you pass judgement. Just because you lose your wallet on your first day as a tourist in Rome doesn't mean that all the inhabitants of the country are pickpockets.

*

Man is an ignoramus and that brings us to the fourth eternal disease. But Homo Sapiens must be. Too much is happening in the world at the same time for us to be able to pay serious attention to it all. Radio, television and the internet fill us with banal news every day. And social media steal the rest of our time. Yet most of the news has no effect on our lives. A landslide in Chile? A volcanic eruption in the Indian Ocean? Rising unemployment in eastern Ukraine? A robbery in a distant city? At some point we even look into sad children's eyes without any real emotion because our emotional world has long been overloaded and overwhelmed.

Wilful ignorance is an extremely useful, helpful and healthy ability for us humans. Otherwise, we would despair of the world and its circumstances. But the guidebook wants to impart knowledge. To do so it must eliminate our natural ignorance. For this reason, we sort out everything that has no real relevance to the purpose of our journey and consists mainly of loud shouting that vies for our attention. In this way, we reduce our daily excitements to a minimum.

At the same time, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Mankind sharpens our eye so that we can look much deeper than before at the decisive movements. And here we can put our emotions to good use. We learn to analyse, classify, understand and empathise. The door to a new world is pushed open, which, like the Matrix (yes, the evil one from the Hollywood films), connects all the decisive points for us into a tangible, graspable picture.

You don't like the Matrix? No problem. The guidebook will ensure that you develop your own personal view of humanity, creating a cocoon of insights in which you will always feel safe and secure.

The animal called man

Earlier we claimed to care little about the origins of Homo Sapiens. That is why we are now talking about them more. Because there are a few things we need to understand about the life form human before we can begin our journey in a meaningful way.

First and foremost, we are pack animals. We are quite different from solitary species like the bear or the tiger. We are also different from all species that come together in pairs and live monogamously, such as mute swans or black vultures. And we certainly do not belong to the animal species that naturally gather in masses, be it insect colonies, flocks of birds or fish. Nor does our nature correspond to a herd animal like the buffalo or the antelope. Humans have only been living in larger groups for 20,000 years. This is far too short a period for Homo Sapiens to have become a herd animal biologically, socially or neuronally. In this short period of time, we have not even managed to overcome lactose intolerance or gluten intolerance across the board.

But how can pack animals be distinguished from herd animals? Both know individuality. The individual members also recognise each other. The actual decisive difference lies in the hunt. There is not a single herd animal on earth that goes hunting. But in order to hunt successfully, pack animals had to develop the division of labour. Let's think of wolves, where most members of the pack panic a herd of buffalo and cause a headlong flight, while the leaders of the pack pick out a specific calf to specifically separate from the herd. The most experienced wolf then jumps at the prey's throat. This behaviour cannot be compared to a hunting swarm of piranhas in the Amazon, where all the animals pounce on the prey in an uncoordinated and simultaneous manner.

Only species that behave as individuals and recognise each other, but at the same time have developed a division of labour, should we count as pack animals. All others belong to the herd animals or to the solitary animals, the pairs, the colonies or swarms.

Homo Sapiens can use almost everything that contains calories and trace elements, from meat to fish and crustaceans, eggs, legumes, grains, berries, nuts, roots, vegetables and salads. This is the only reason why mankind was able to spread so quickly and successfully over the entire earth. But what characterises a pack animal that eats almost everything and knows little socialisation? Let's look around the rest of the animal world and search for comparable species.

No, we are not lions. They belong to the pack animals as well. But our diet is far more varied. That's why our way of life and our daily routine are quite different from those of the big cats. We are probably more like wolves, who sometimes eat berries or mushrooms when in need. We mix cereals and vegetables into our dogs' food. It is said that there are even poor pigs among the dogs who are fed vegan food by their owners.

Speaking about pigs. Biologically and socially, we are probably most like pigs. An omnivore that lives in packs and knows a certain hierarchy, but not a strict hierarchy as herd animals often have, but merely a structure of leaders and followers.

Observing wild pigs, however, is just as difficult as researching chimpanzees in the jungle. Analysing breeding pigs, on the other hand, is of no use to us. They have lived in captivity for several thousand generations, are bred for certain characteristics and, moreover, are slaughtered after a few months, rarely dying a natural death after a long life. Thus the domestic pig, just to give one example, usually lacks any social exchange between piglet and boar.

Let's look at a pack of dogs instead. Canis lupus familiaris has been domesticated for a similarly long time as humans and has accompanied us in any case since we began living in permanent settlements. Such a pack of dogs could certainly bring us a little closer to human nature. However, dogs are far more simple-minded than Homo Sapiens and a direct comparison is only possible to a limited extent.

Dogs don't like to be alone. They need their pack to feel secure. Dogs also need to always know who the leader is and what their leader demands of them. If no one else in the pack assumes the leadership role, every dog immediately feels obliged to take charge and thus responsibility, no matter how small and weak it may feel. If, however, a frightened dog is forced into the leadership role, it reacts with exaggerated vigilance and high aggression.

You see, any resemblances to us humans are purely coincidental. Joking aside. Humans, too, are decidedly social creatures who need their pack, which they call family, clan, kin, circle of friends, party, club or non-governmental organisation. Those who must live without a family are rarely happy or even satisfied. In addition, humans always naturally create a hierarchy for themselves, just like a herd of wild boars or a pack of dogs. But only about every tenth person is suitable for the position at the head of his pack, can take even drastic measures responsibly, and is also prepared to bear the resulting consequences personally. If a less capable person is forced into the role of a decision-maker and leader, or if he or she assumes this position, things almost always go wrong. Like frightened dogs who can only see danger everywhere. They develop into ankle-biters because they are not good for much more.

In a pack of dogs, each member must indulge in calm composure. If one of the animals is nervous or even aggressive for no apparent reason, the other dogs try to calm it down. If they fail, the fight inevitably begins. The agitated or aggressive member is forced to calm down by the pack. At this point, we do not want to speculate or even philosophise about how such situations work in the human world. Homo Sapiens has created far more complex organisations and institutions than a pack of dogs. Therefore, we can never derive 1:1 from the animal world. Even if that would be appealing in some cases. The only important thing for us Hitchhikers to the Mankind is that we internalise the two needs of every pack animal.

People need a leadership structure

and they demand within the community

consideration and an unconditional will for peace.

An almost all eating animal that naturally lives in clans and has been organising itself into villages, tribes, peoples, nations and increasingly across entire continents for 20,000 years, a pack animal that now appears in mass and tries to live together as peacefully as possible.

This is how we should see the human being and humanity when we now turn to history.

A really short history of mankind

Do you know the comic figure Hägar the Horrible? The cartoons featuring the Viking chieftain were printed in hundreds of newspapers worldwide in the 1980s. In our favourite episode, Hamlet, the son of Hägar, is reading in a thick book. Lucky Eddie, Hägar's first made and best friend, comes by and asks the boy what he is reading. »The history of mankind«, Hamlet replies. Lucky Eddie walks a little further, stops, turns to Hamlet and asks him: »Can I have a look at the end?«

*

Our universe is 13.8 billion years old. Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, began to form 13.6 billion years ago. We humans can neither comprehend nor feel such long periods of time. Our life expectancy of eighty-five years is too short for that. In order to place the history of mankind in the 13.8 billion year old universe, we distribute the long-time span over a handy Earth year. According to this calculation, the big bang occurred on 1 January at 00:00:00 and we would currently stand on 31 December at 23:59:59. But let's be clear about this. It is not the end of the world for humanity and we are not threatened by the end of the world. Even if populists and soothsayers have been telling us for centuries that the end of Homo Sapiens is near. We only use the date and time to make events tangible for us.

In our imagined Big Bang year, our own galaxy, which we call the Milky Way, began to form on 6 January. However, our planetary system with the sun at its centre took its time. It was not until the beginning of October, when the universe already had a full 270 days under its belt, that gases and matter began to clump together and form the sun, planets, moons, dwarf planets and planetoids.

The first life on Earth stirred towards the end of October. Dinosaurs saw the light of day two months later, on 25 December. The first flower opened its bud on 28 December. In the early morning of 30 December, the dinosaurs died out, after what must have been a single, exhausting week of work. In the first 364 days of our space year, there was still no sign of Homo Sapiens. Not even a rudimentary one.

31 December / 6:00 pm

On the last day of the year, six hours before midnight, the first monkeys straighten up now and then, standing on their hind legs for a short time to look around alertly, like today's prairie dogs.

31 December / 10:00 pm

Four hours later, Australopithecus, a distant relative of us humanoids, has made a habit of walking upright. A drastic change in climate forces him to live on hard-shelled nuts and fibrous plants. He invents the tapping stone as his first tool. Since brittle flint shatters into sharp shards when used as a hammer, Australopithecus also develops the first cutting tools at the same time as the tapping stone. With their help, he can cut through the fur of dead animals that he comes across from time to time in the savannah and slice the meat underneath. In this way, he secures an additional, protein-rich, energy-rich food source.

31 December / 10:30 pm

Half an hour after Australopithecus, the first being of the genus Homo is born in eastern Africa. Ten minutes later, Homo Erectus appears in the same place. He already uses different tools, invents the first weapons for his defence and for hunting.

31 December / 11:20 pm

Forty minutes before midnight, Homo Erectus has learned how to use fire and finally becomes a hunter-gatherer. From now on, he moves as a nomad behind the large herds of animals, spreading across the continents of Africa, Asia and Europe in the following big bang minutes.

31 December / 11:48 pm

It is only twelve minutes before the end of our Big Bang year that Homo Sapiens, the modern human being, appears on the world stage. We will discuss the details of his further history in a moment.

31 December / 11:59:15 pm

Just forty-five seconds ago, Homo Sapiens became sedentary.

31 December / 11:59:46 pm

It was barely fourteen seconds ago that the first human being known to us by name lived.

Almost everything that touches us today, that we often look back on with pride, happened in the last fourteen seconds of our Big Bang year. In this tiny time span, we have indeed become the defining species on Earth. But our world is quite small compared to other planets in space. Moreover, we move in an insignificant solar system that lies on the edge of an unimpressive galaxy. Frankly, this is not a good enough reason to think too highly of humanity.

*

The colonisation of the earth by the genus Homo

If we want to explain today's humanity and thus also learn to understand it, we must at least know its most important historical stages. Only in this way will we be able to evaluate certain current conditions and recognise upcoming developments. In this task, we will limit ourselves to the really important events. That is why we will skip most of the world empires and dynasties. We are also indifferent to famous conquerors and heroes. For, in view of thousands of years of human history, they all exercised their influence only for a short time or locally. What of them has managed to survive to the present day has long since blended with other things and thus become something new.

Paleontologists currently (2020) distinguish thirteen species of the genus Homo, twelve of which became extinct long before modern humans became sedentary. The earliest species are called Homo Rudolfensis, Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus and Homo Ergaster. They all originated in Africa and the bone finds are estimated to be up to 2.5 million years old.

Already the older species began to spread in Africa. Homo erectus also reached Asia and Europe quite early. In Georgia, southwest of the capital Tbilisi, remains of a subspecies of Homo Erectus were found that lived there 1.85 million years ago. In northern Spain, bones of Homo Atecessor, a further development of Homo Erectus, were found that are estimated to be 950,000 years old. Homo Heidelbergensis, an ancestor of Neanderthal, lived in Central Europe 600,000 to 200,000 years ago. In South Africa, Homo Naledi evolved 300,000 years ago and in Zambia, Homo Rhodesiensis existed at the same time. In the Philippines, Homo Lugonensis survived until about 66,000 years ago. In Indonesia, Homo Floresiensis probably died out 60,000 years ago. Neanderthal man began 200,000 years ago and colonised large parts of Europe and western Asia in the following millennia. At the same time, Denisova Man, a close relative of Neanderthal Man, spread across Central and Southeast Asia. But these two last competitors of Homo Sapiens also died out more than 30,000 years ago.

Modern humans evolved 300,000 years ago in northwest Africa. He possessed more flexible limbs than his ancestors and his then still living competitors of the genus Homo. In addition, his body structure was much lighter than that of many other species. This allowed him to make better tools and weapons and use them more effectively. He also travelled longer distances with less energy consumption and reproduced more successfully than other species of the genus Homo.

Immediately after its emergence, it began to spread successfully. First in Africa, sometime later also in Asia, Australia and Europe. On his migrations, he encountered the descendants of his ancestors almost everywhere. Homo Sapiens displaced the other human species and mixed with them. Thus a few percent of genetic material from earlier species of the genus Homo, especially Neanderthal and Denisova Man, can be found in almost all humans today. Let's plot the distribution of Homo Sapiens on a world map.

Figure 1: The Spread of Homo Sapiens

In northwest Africa, modern man begins to spread immediately after his emergence 300,000 years ago. He reached the Arabian Peninsula 100,000 years ago and the Indian subcontinent 63,000 years ago. By 45,000 years ago, he is to be found in what is now China and a little later in Australia. He colonised Central Asia and Europe 42,000 years ago. People reached South America from West Africa 30,000 years ago and spreads to Central America and to the South of North America during the next 15,000 years. Homo Sapiens arrived in Siberia 20,000 years ago. From there it migrated across the land bridge that still existed at that time to the American continent. He reached Central America 15,000 years ago and colonised South America 13,000 years ago.

Unfortunately, there are still people who adhere to a senseless racial doctrine. But the only purebred population of Homo Sapiens can be found in southern Africa. Only there have modern humans not mixed with earlier species of the genus Homo. We Europeans, but we Americans, we Asians, we Australians or we North and East Africans too are all mixed populations of Homo Sapiens with a dash of other Homo species. All the indigenous peoples we call ourselves today, such as the Inuit, the Aborigines, the Prairie Indians or the Amazon Indians, are also all mixed forms of Homo Sapiens with a dash of Neanderthal or Denisova man.

The few percent of genetic material that Homo Sapiens retained from the other human species brought them some advantages. They support the formation of fat reserves, which serves survival in a cold climate, but also during periods of drought. Since many humans have almost unlimited access to food, we developed many civilisational diseases such as obesity or type II diabetes based on our genetic heritage. We may well regard these afflictions, for fun, as the late revenge of the species of the genus Homo that we displaced.

Another advantage of the inherited genes is a moderation of the mind or a tendency towards practicality. For science has found that the pure Homo Sapiens in South and Central Africa are basically more mentally potent than the rest of humanity. But they know how to use this ability less purposefully and thus with less determination. This could well be one of the reasons why Homo Sapiens already settled in Central and South Africa 200,000 years ago, but their population grew much more slowly than in the north and east of Africa, in Asia and in Europe, with all the mixed forms from the genus Homo. But it also provides arguments why in the USA most new styles of music have been and continue to be developed by African-American artists. Their artistic intellect seems to continue to trump that of us hybrids.

As Hitchhikers to the Mankind, we hold that only the pure-like Homo Sapiens in Central and South Africa could find a reason for stupid racism. All other humans on earth are hybrids of different species of the genus Homo.

According to the Clovis theory, Homo Sapiens arrived on the American continent 18,000 years ago via the then still existing land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. However, a threefold settlement of the huge land mass seems more plausible to scientists today. In Florida, for example, traces of settlement have been found that date back to 14,500 years ago. However, these could hardly have been Clovis people from Alaska. For the huge glaciers in Canada and in the north of the USA had hindered the advance of mankind for five thousand years at that time. In the north-east of Brazil, there are also traces of a civilisation that appear to be at least 30,000 years old. People from Africa could have already reached the American continent back then, thanks to the ocean currents that still exist today. In addition, thousands of years ago, the ancestors of today's Polynesians could have reached South America with sailing ships. For all of today's chicken breeds in South America are descended from Polynesian ones, as genetic analyses prove.

But let us leave this field of speculation, which is not very fruitful for us, to the archaeologists and palaeontologists. Instead, let us turn to the far more fascinating question of why the indigenous peoples of Australia, America and southern Africa remained such technological and economic philistines until the emergence of the European explorers and conquerors.

Please forgive the harsh wording. But the guidebook wants to find answers to all the important questions about humanity. That is why we also face the uncomfortable facts. For the Mayas, the Incas and the Aztecs in America between the 3rd and 16th centuries had indeed founded mighty empires and built wonderful pyramids and temples. They also lived in huge cities with up to a million inhabitants. But their way of life was essentially the same as the Old Kingdom in Egypt around 2500 BC. At the time of their discovery by the Spanish at the beginning of the 16th century, the peoples of the Americas are backwarded technologically a good four thousand years behind Europe, Asia and North Africa. They neither knew how to smelt iron, nor did they possess gunpowder or had developed ocean-going ships. Many Indian peoples of North America were still living as pure nomads in the 19th century, just like most people in Europe, Asia and North Africa 6,000 years earlier. The last significant pastoral and migratory people of the Old World, the Mongols, no longer played a decisive role on the vast Eurasian continent by the end of the 15th century.

The Aborigines in Australia had also developed little technology in the 43,000 years or so of settlement on their continent, compared to the peoples of Asia, Europe and North Africa. And in Central and South Africa, Homo Sapiens had persevered for almost 200,000 years without raising his technical knowledge and skills even remotely to the level of the north of the same continent. The duration of Homo Sapiens' stay in a certain place does not explain the immense scientific and technological backwardness in many regions of the earth.

In order to name the real reasons, we must go back a little and abstract. We do not have any reliable data on the numerical distribution of Homo Sapiens in early times. But we can at least look at the worldwide distribution of the population around the year 1500 AD, i.e., at the time of the first voyages of discovery, and thus find out the decisive factors for the differences.

Figure 2: Population density around the year 1500

In Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, there were five people per square kilometre in 1500 AD. In the rest of the world, there was only one person per square kilometre at the same time.

The five times higher population density in Europe, the Mediterranean region and the whole of Asia meant that Homo Sapiens could and had to interact here around twenty times more intensively than in America, Australia and southern Africa. The lively contact took place not only through trade and due to migrations, but also by means of war. The much denser settlement in Asia, Europe and North Africa inevitably led to the fact that these peoples could and had to develop more rapidly scientifically, technologically and economically. For those who meet learn from each other and begin to compete naturally, pushing each other to ever higher achievements. We can see this even today in every major city on earth. The population there always lives more progressively than people in the countryside. City dwellers are almost always better dressed, or at least more modern. They also spend more money on jewellery or personal hygiene. The higher population density naturally leads to increased competition.

Nature favoured Europe in particular. The continent has the longest seacoast of all continents in comparison to its surface area. Many large rivers also run through the country. In