My best guess is to delay the discovery/acceptance of science. Imagine a world where Descartes never made his clever arguments (the hand etc.) that made it possible to pursue natural philosophy in a way that was compatible with Christianity. Or one in which western Christianity took up a ban on idol-like representations (as Islam has—a friend tells me it very nearly got there, and changing one influential essay would be enough), so art was not pursued the same way, projective geometry didn’t arise, and the axiomatic revolution never happened, or happened much later.
Or, being more subtle, what about a world with no islands—that is, no places where heretics could go into exile but continue working on their heretical things. The Netherlands was able to be such a place because of the defensibility of swamplands and its position as a pawn in wider political machinations, right? I’m trying to think of the kind of world that would give rise to a strong, unified government—which then wouldn’t even need to be particularly evil, just populist and follow the typical medieval outlook. What about a world where weapons of mass destruction were easily available, where any reasonably competent person could create a city-destroying weapon from naturally available materials?
People learn best through pain. What about a world that has embraced this—where torture is an everyday fact of life, what you do to kids as part of bringing them up, what you do to subordinates who need to acquire a new skill?
Lead poisoning makes people stupid and aggressive—not enough to make society collapse, but enough to make everyone’s lives a little bit worse. What about a world where, rather than gold and copper and the like, the aesthetically attractive metals are the kind that cause heavy metal poisoning.
This is a good try, but I am looking for something much, much worse. Like 30 billion people living in complete destitution with massive famines sweeping the world ever seven years killing off 40% of the population each time and leaving the rest in pain and agony. Or only one in twenty children survive past the age of seven, the rest dying terribly. A world so bad it makes you uncomfortable to even think about it. I’m also thinking about this more on geological time scales—we can probably come up with a world where such suffering has been going on at least long enough for evolutionary pressures to be significantly compensating for some of the dreadful environmental effects.
I do like the idea of lead poisoning. The only thing difficult with that from the story perspective would be the relative difficulty in rectifying that problem but that’s probably fixable with some creativity. Easily accessible WMPs wasn’t the direction I was thinking of but might work and is definitely your most horrifying suggestion from my view.
My best guess is to delay the discovery/acceptance of science. Imagine a world where Descartes never made his clever arguments (the hand etc.) that made it possible to pursue natural philosophy in a way that was compatible with Christianity. Or one in which western Christianity took up a ban on idol-like representations (as Islam has—a friend tells me it very nearly got there, and changing one influential essay would be enough), so art was not pursued the same way, projective geometry didn’t arise, and the axiomatic revolution never happened, or happened much later.
Or, being more subtle, what about a world with no islands—that is, no places where heretics could go into exile but continue working on their heretical things. The Netherlands was able to be such a place because of the defensibility of swamplands and its position as a pawn in wider political machinations, right? I’m trying to think of the kind of world that would give rise to a strong, unified government—which then wouldn’t even need to be particularly evil, just populist and follow the typical medieval outlook. What about a world where weapons of mass destruction were easily available, where any reasonably competent person could create a city-destroying weapon from naturally available materials?
People learn best through pain. What about a world that has embraced this—where torture is an everyday fact of life, what you do to kids as part of bringing them up, what you do to subordinates who need to acquire a new skill?
Lead poisoning makes people stupid and aggressive—not enough to make society collapse, but enough to make everyone’s lives a little bit worse. What about a world where, rather than gold and copper and the like, the aesthetically attractive metals are the kind that cause heavy metal poisoning.
This is a good try, but I am looking for something much, much worse. Like 30 billion people living in complete destitution with massive famines sweeping the world ever seven years killing off 40% of the population each time and leaving the rest in pain and agony. Or only one in twenty children survive past the age of seven, the rest dying terribly. A world so bad it makes you uncomfortable to even think about it. I’m also thinking about this more on geological time scales—we can probably come up with a world where such suffering has been going on at least long enough for evolutionary pressures to be significantly compensating for some of the dreadful environmental effects.
I do like the idea of lead poisoning. The only thing difficult with that from the story perspective would be the relative difficulty in rectifying that problem but that’s probably fixable with some creativity. Easily accessible WMPs wasn’t the direction I was thinking of but might work and is definitely your most horrifying suggestion from my view.