AI Practice Knowledge BaseCounterintuitive Facts (3): Rules You Don't Understand Were Often Paid for in Corpses
PremiumChesterton's Fence: Behind those 'stupid traditions' there's usually a pile of dead bodies
I. 1958, the "Four Pests" campaign. One of the four pests was sparrows. The reason: sparrows eat grain, they're enemies of farmers. The whole nation mobilized. Old and young alike, banging gongs and drums to scare sparrows, not letting them land, until the sparrows died of exhaustion in the air. Hundreds of millions of sparrows were eliminated. Victory.
II. 1959. Locust outbreak. Because there were no sparrows to eat them. Locusts devoured the crops. Then famine came. Conservative estimates: 15 to 55 million people starved to death.
III. That fence. The sparrows. Looked like "pests," like "enemies that waste grain." But they were actually a balancer in the ecosystem. Those who tore it down had no idea what it was doing. The price was tens of millions of lives.
IV. This is Chesterton's Fenc
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