And that’s why we rule the world.

It’s an intriguing if uncomfortable question. Just how did we end up running things, anyhow? What was it about being a white European that led to the power and wealth imbalance that is only now being even out by the passage of time and advancement of other parties?

Jared Diamond, in his excellent book (and television series) entitled Guns, Germs, and Steel, , presents the theory that the success of white Europeans is, by and large, due to luck. We just happened to have originated in a place with tons of resources, including important minerals, domesticatable animals, and just the right germs and parasites to give us robust immune systems.

I believe his theory to be substantially true, but incomplete. These were all important advantages, and it would certainly be comforting in this enlightened humanist age to be able to look at the rest of the world, shrugs our shoulders, and with sheepish grins, say “Aw shucks, I guess we just got lucky. ”

It would be comforting… but it would be untrue, and more than a little disingenuous. Luck alone cannot account for the position of dominance we still occupy today. There has to be something more, something that gave us an edge, something that led us to take these advantages and turn them into the kind of power that can bring the whole world under our control.

The answer, I think, is that we are fundamentally mentally unstable.

This mental instability takes many forms, but for the most part, they all fundamentally boil down to a certain potent trait : restlessness. We are simply never satisfied. We always want more. More power, more money, more influence, more resources, more love, more attention, more please, more comfort, more luxury, more progress, more of everything in our power to recognize as desirable. No matter how much we get, we want more. And if ever we get enough of something to satisfy our desire for it, this satiation does not placate us for long. Soon, we are asking ourselves “Is that it? Is that all there is to life?” and we either find another horizon to pursue, or descend into the madness and decadence with a vengeance.

A saner people would reach that point and say “That’s it? I have everything that is good in life? Oh, good!” and cease their maddened searching and acquiring, entirely satisfied that as far as this thing called “life” was concerned, we pretty much had it licked.

But as far as I can tell, not only does this thought rarely occur to us at all, but when it does, it inherently makes us uncomfortable and suspicious. After all, if there is no more reaching and striving to life, what is the point? To a restless and unstable people like we modern white people, the very thought of simply being done with all that seems very much like death.

We might admire the more relaxed peoples of the world and their more easygoing, less stressful, more easily content ways, but deep down, we know we cannot actually become them.

And while we try very hard to ignore it, we can’t help but notice that they tend to end up working for us. And as we visit their cozy and relaxed world for vacation, we also can’t help but notice that all that relaxation comes at a fairly heavy price in terms of quality of life.

Now for the truly uncomfortable question : is this advantage genetic, or cultural?

I think genetics play some role. I think a lot of this restlessness comes from the Northern European sector of the white genome, which is, after all, where this whole white skin thing comes from in the first place. I think that harsh conditions in Northern Europe genetically selected for a restless people who are always looking for more because the real enemy, the wolf that always was at the door, was the killing scourge of winter.

The people who got a certain amount of resources and stopped, content, simply did not last the winter, and did not pass on their genes. The ones driven to get all they can out of every single precious heartbeat outside winter’s icy grasp survived.

And so we live, always restless, never satisfied, always seeking more, driven by an unshakable sense of oncoming doom, danger, and catastrophe to control, dominate, manipulate, and accumulate.

It is madness on the very face of it, and leads to a host of modern problems, such as stress related illness, neurosis, depression, and even premature death.

But it is also how we ended up in charge of things.

We were just crazy enough to want it all for ourselves.