Charles C. Mann: belief

Transcript context

…Now, as you well know, there’s huge literature on how Cortez and the Spaniards managed to conquer the Aztec Triple Alliance. For me, it’s one of mankind’s most remarkable but also tragic stories. But in the whole set of explanations, what do you think is the underrated factor in how so few people managed to take over such a mighty, and in many ways highly advanced, civilization? Well, it wasn’t so few. What I think is the underrated factor is that Cortez was much less a military genius than he was a political genius. He was quite a remarkable politician, really deft. And what he did is . . . The Aztecs were an empire, the Triple Alliance, and they were not nice people. They were rough customers. And there was a lot of people whom they had subjugated, and people whom they were warring on who really detested them. And Cortez was able to knit them together into an enormous army, lead that army in there, have all these people do all that, and then hijack the result. This is an act of political genius worthy of Napoleon. Actually, Napoleon did sort of the same thing: He hijacked the French Revolution and put himself into power. [laughs] Okay, Cortez is Napoleon. Here’s a very general question I’ve wrestled with over the years. If I travel to most parts of Asia, I actually feel really very safe, even late at night. When I travel in the New World, it depends where I am, but very often, I don’t feel entirely safe. And if you look at murder rates, crime rates, it does seem, on average, many parts of the New World are quite a bit more violent than many parts of Asia. What theories or what categories do you apply to help explain why the New World has evolved to be relatively so violent? Not Canada, of course, but I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. How do you think about that?…

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