What makes us human? Is it our intelligence? Our creativity? Or is it something far simpler, far darker?
Something we don't like to admit. For centuries, we've told ourselves stories. Stories of progress, of civilization, of human uniqueness. All because at some point one of our ancestors picked up a rock.
And with that rock in its filthy paw, it crowned itself the genius of the animal world. But was it genius? Or was it just another crude, instinct-driven reflex? No different from a beaver's dam or a crab's stolen shell.
Welcome back. This is Nox. I'm your host, Maverick. This podcast is where we rip through the illusions and face the raw, unfiltered truths about human nature.
And today, we're evolving. For those of you who've been following this podcast, you know that we've spent a lot of time discussing and analyzing the ideas presented in this book. But starting now, I'm making a shift and I want you to understand why. This book, Alexander Nevzorov's The Origins of Genius and Fascism, is not just another intellectual exercise.
It's a brutal dissection of everything we think we know about ourselves. And I want you to hear it as it is, without filters, without interpretations, without distractions. Just the raw, unrelenting text, translated into English for the first time and narrated by me. This isn't about simplifying the podcast.
It's about refining it. By separating the pure text from the discussions, we create space for something even deeper. That's why I'm launching a parallel podcast. One that will be entirely devoted to analyzing and expanding on Nevzorov's ideas, chapter by chapter.
If you've ever wanted to go even further, to challenge and be challenged, that's where we'll do it. And trust me, you, my loyal listeners, will be the first to know when it drops. For now, let's get to what you came here for. Today's episode consists of two full chapters.
Chapter 8, A Stone in the Paw, and chapter 9, The Day the Tale Was Lost. Two brutal, unrelenting dissections of humanity's most cherished delusions. Two more cracks in the grand illusion of human exceptionalism. And before we begin, let's get one thing straight.
If you're listening to this and you're still not subscribed, what the hell are you waiting for? Hit that subscribe button. Follow NOX everywhere. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Amazon, whatever platform you use, we're there.
All links are in the description. No excuses, no delays. You want unfiltered, brutal honesty, then make sure you don't miss a single episode. All right, let's begin.
Chapter 8. A Stone in the Paw. I believe the entire chain of amusing misconceptions about humans begins with the myth of rational instrumentalism. Thanks to a chunk of cobblestone in a dirty paw, humanity arrogantly crowned itself the collective genius of the animal world.
That stone became the foundation for the belief that the homogeous possessed some mysterious distinction from the rest of the fauna. And from that very stone began the path that would eventually lead the scavenging pack animal to the collider, to Auschwitz, and to other so-called pinnacles of civilization. Yet in 250 years of anthropology's existence, no one has seriously bothered to ask, why did this animal start carrying around a rock in the first place? But that is precisely the first thing we should be figuring out, because the origin of a trait defines both its potential and its true nature.
No phenomenon can be separated from the reason for its appearance. Let me remind you, all development is nothing more than the refinement and expansion of primitive features. Once upon a time, the discovery of these stone tools sent anthropologists into a frenzy. They got so worked up that these chipped rocks became symbols of early human uniqueness, and the foundation for the theory of hominid exceptionalism.
Yes, at some point, our animal really does end up with a stone in its paws. This happens in the starving Pleistocene, a couple of million years before the elephant scene I described earlier. That moment, when the creature first picked up a rock fragment, is considered historic, even fateful. But here's where things get interesting.
The entire history of primitive tools is not proof of homo's intelligence. It's proof of its staggering stupidity. There were plenty of objects around that would have been far easier to turn into tools than river stones or obsidian. And yet, what's even more unsettling is that this animal couldn't do anything extraordinary with that rock, nor did it try.
It remained the same creature, just with a stone in its paws. Despite all the grandiose significance attached to this moment, nothing changed in the animal's life. No progress, no hint of development. Nothing.
With a rock in its paws, our creature continued scavenging for spiders and carrion for another 2 million years. It defecated, fought, and copulated. Without once bothering to seek out new tools or new amusements. The stone's original purpose?
Smashing bones that had already been picked clean by someone else. Bones always contain something edible, or at least something to suck on, that's inaccessible to smaller scavengers and uninteresting to larger predators. Red and yellow bone marrow isn't exactly prime rib, but hey, it's something. Breaking open bones was critical in the starving Pleistocene.
For a detritivore that rarely got first dibs on the filet, this skill was life-saving. Then, as the Pleistocene followed the Pliocene, the menu changed. There was more meat, more carrion, enough to go around, even for humans. Now, it wasn't just about breaking bones, it was about carving flesh.
And that forced our creature to start chipping stones to make them sharper. But still, there was no attempt to seek out a new kind of tool. No invention, no innovation. Was the stone in the paw a conscious act?
Was it a rational decision or just an innate blind trait? Something we see in crabs, octopuses and beavers? There is absolutely no way the first interactions of homo with stone fragments were intentional. Why?
Because we're talking about an ordinary animal. One that, at that time, was incapable of forming even a single cause and effect relationship. Let alone a complex chain of them. Let's not forget that the creature we're discussing had the cognitive level of an otter.
Its life was no different from that of a hyena. At this stage of development, it was completely incapable of organizing production or passing knowledge from one individual to another. The first stones date back to a time when homo was undeniably in an entirely animalistic state. Even if an individual accidentally figured out how to use a sharp rock, it was incapable of preserving that skill or spreading it to other packs.
Let's remember, there was no language yet. Sure, there was mumbling, growling, and scent marking. Of course, they could piss on food and females. This, after all, is what the great-grandfathers of Hegel and Kant were doing.
But encoding the blueprint for a tool and even the strongest smelling urine is quite the challenge. How is it possible that all homo began wielding sharp stones simultaneously? There are only two possible explanations. 3 and a half million years ago, a World Congress of Paranthropus was convened.
A certain craftsman from the stars hosted a master class on the use of stone flakes. Delegates took notes and implemented the know-how in their respective packs. Naturally, all were provided with name tags and soda. A purely genetic predisposition.
Many species of animals have an unconscious ability to manipulate objects for their own needs. In the Pleistocene, Homo had this trait just as primitively and automatically as otters, bowerbirds, beavers, finches, crabs, swallows, termites, and countless other creatures. There was no intelligence involved, none whatsoever. All it took for homo to start smashing things with a rock was the activation of a trash tier gene.
One that simply forced the animal to manipulate objects. The Rufus-backed swallow builds complex arched nests out of a thousand perfectly shaped clay blocks. The hermit crab crafts active armor, attaching debris and living organisms to its shell. Sometimes even carrying a dead jellyfish on its back.
The beaver adjusts the length of branches before using them in construction. The hornet is a master geometer, effortlessly calculating congruencies, parallelograms, and multidimensional prisms to create mathematically perfect nests. But the hornet has no brain to speak of. Just a few neurons in its supraesophageal ganglion.
And yet, it constructs flawless geometric structures. With a very high degree of probability, our scavenger homo upon picking up a rock, was simply obeying a dark genetic command, nothing more. Its actions were not, and could not have been, conscious. They were not based on reasoning, experience, or understanding.
They were dictated purely by genetic programming. The body mindlessly executed these stereotypical motor acts, exactly as prescribed by the genome. It happened just as automatically as it does in otters, crabs, hornets, and Rufus-backed swallows. And without any fundamental change, it was repeated in every new individual, in every new generation.
End of Chapter 8. So, dear listeners, that concludes Chapter 8, A Stone in the Paw. And what did we learn? That everything, everything humanity built, from its myths of progress to its so-called intelligence, started with a mindless reflexive act.
A genetic impulse, not reason, not ingenuity, just a scavenger, blindly obeying its programming. The illusion of human exceptionalism? Cracked. The myth of rationality?
Exposed. And we're only halfway through. But before we continue, let's take a break. Tradition is tradition.
I've got a track lined up for you that's so good, you won't even notice how fast this interlude flies by. And while you wait, take a moment and do the smart thing and subscribe. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Amazon. Wherever you listen, Nox is there.
All links are in the description. All right, enjoy the music. I'll be back in a moment with Chapter 9. Well, how was that?
Blue Detrick, Lovely Black Heart, original mix. A perfect mood setter, wasn't it? But now, let's get back to it. As you know, starting today, Nox is evolving.
From this episode forward, our format is changing. No more interruptions, no more side discussions, just the raw unfiltered text translated into English for the first time and narrated by me. But don't think the discussions are gone. Far from it.
The deep dives, the breakdowns, the intellectual duels, they're getting their own dedicated space. I'm working on a parallel podcast where we'll analyze and expand on every chapter of this book. For now, though, let's get back to the text. Chapter 9, The Day the Tale Was Lost.
As you can see, once you start digging into the origins of human behavior, Gulags, terrorist attacks, and the resurrection of gods stop being a mystery. What else could you possibly expect from the grandchildren of the Pleistocene's secretive scavengers? Of course, humans desperately want to forget their true past. That's exactly why culture and history exist.
But if culture occasionally misbehaves and even rips off the covers, history never does. History is a perfectly trained discipline. It guarantees the erasure of whatever shouldn't be remembered, which is precisely what it was created for. But knowledge of the brain brings sobriety, and sobriety allows us to extract something useful even from such a forgery as the so-called chronicle of humankind.
Who defeated whom at Gaugamela, Grunwald, or Stalingrad doesn't matter in the slightest. Even if those battles never actually happened, there were plenty of others just like them. Because strictly speaking, the entire history of homo is phenomenally monotonous. Nothing ever happens in it except killing and copulation.
It's as if a never-ending circus of horrors simply changes costumes, wanders through the centuries, and never alters its repertoire. The specifics of mass murder are unimportant. So are their names, and so are the exact dates. Aries merely change a man's outfit and rearrange the scenery.
What does matter is something else entirely. It's military events scattered across different centuries that clearly demonstrate the immutability of human instincts since the Pleistocene. And at the same time, the powerlessness of progress. Because, as it turns out, progress doesn't change emotions, it doesn't change behavior.
Are there any cultural records of early humans that haven't been distorted? Yes, there are. The first criminal codes, Hammurabi, Urukagina, Ur-Nammu, Eshnunna, all of them. These ancient collections of laws must be read correctly, without getting distracted by all the breast cuttings and other spicy details of early justice.
The legal codes of Mesopotamia should be seen for what they really are. A catalog of the behaviors early humans were capable of. This list of crimes, this is the real portrait of man. Let's be clear.
The only book that tells the full truth about humanity is the criminal code. Over time, of course, the codes have become much thicker. No surprise there. Crime evolves too.
Yes, today primitive cave savagery has dressed itself up. It has painted itself with religions and homelands, armed itself with technology, and lit eternal flames. But fundamentally, nothing has changed. The official opening of the human freak show happened around 5,200 years ago.
The children of cannibals and corpse scavengers wrapped themselves in Sumerian robes, dyed their beards, and began to complicate things. But they had nothing to draw from except the experience of the Pleistocene war of all against all. They had no other reference point for behavior. The only thing they could refine and develop was what had already been ingrained in them during their formative era.
Let me remind you, for 2 million years, homo studied diligently and even became an honor student. Of course, the headmaster of its school of life was a cave bear, and its teachers were hunger, lust, and fear. And everything those three masters taught was learned by heart and became the foundation of human behavior. Since then, not one single new trait has emerged, and not one single old one has disappeared.
Man is forever doomed to carry a scavenger and a cannibal within himself. And that will never change. In the past 6,000 years, there have been no fundamental changes in the human central nervous system. And why would there be?
Yes, religion and culture have had to adjust certain things. They are influential but they are purely decorative. They can sometimes compete with aggression or with an erection, but they certainly cannot make fundamental changes to human nature. As we all know, love for one's neighbor has never stopped anyone from building a concentration camp for him.
Let's be honest. Nothing unique ever came out of homo. Strictly speaking, evolution's work was a waste. It clearly shouldn't have wasted energy on turning Australopithecines into Homo ergaster.
It shouldn't have bothered with any of the following transformations either. And it definitely shouldn't have reduced brow ridges or stripped these creatures of their fur. Humanity could have been left exactly as it was in the Pleistocene. Because for hordes of males to mutilate each other at Borodino or in any other brawl, no species evolution was required.
And as for organizing the Holocaust, well, there was certainly no need to spend extra on costumes and set design. Almost all of human history could have been played out in fur. End of chapter 9. And that's it, dear listeners.
Two chapters, two more fractures in the illusion of human exceptionalism. If you've made it this far, you're already ahead of the curve. You're already questioning, already thinking beyond the comfortable myths, and that's exactly why Nox exists. But let's make one thing clear, this conversation doesn't end here.
Subscribe, leave a comment, share this podcast with those who are ready to hear the truth. Nox is on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, Amazon. Wherever you listen, we are there. Links are in the description.
And if anything in today's episode left you wondering, if some term or idea seemed unclear, check the pinned comment. You'll find explanations on key terminology used in this text. But more importantly, stay engaged, stay critical, stay ruthless in your pursuit of truth. You deserve to know.
And remember, in night we trust.