What I've Been Reading (August 2022)
Adultery and Incas
Cheatingland: The Secret Confessions of Men Who Stray, by Anonymous - This was a wild book. The anonymous author interviews 61 men and 12 women who have cheated on their spouse to try to understand why they cheat and how they justify it. A few of the takeaways:
Most of the men who cheated said they were happy at home and in love with their wives - cheating for them was a way to have an adventure, escape reality, feel young, and have fun. Some men buy Porsches when they turn 40, seems like others have affairs. “Cheatingland is a space where both parties in an affair are presenting the best versions of themselves to each other.” Cheating is much more about the person having the affair than the person who is being cheated on
What do cheaters have in common? The most common thing is that their dads had cheated on their mothers or encouraged them to cheat. They also are “are usually impulsive, good at compartmentalizing, quick to chase self gratification, and slow to realize the potential consequences of their actions.” And most of them were mentally OK with cheating even before their marriage started.
The number one reason men stop cheating? Their careers. Cheating takes up lots of time and mental energy - not only spending time with the person you are cheating with, but making up excuses and alibis and doing everything you can to avoid getting caught.
This was a pretty unique book and fast read. Parts of it were pretty grim - especially the fact that most men who cheat generally are happy with their wives and love them, but do it anyway. In terms of “lessons,” the main one is probably “don’t cheat.” It sounds like a great way to ruin multiple people’s lives - and watch the same movies over and over:
Another tactic that some cheaters use to throw off the scent is taking both their wives and their girlfriends to the same restaurants and the same movies, and so on, thus making it easier to keep the memories straight and lessen the potential of saying the wrong thing. Several felt that minimizing the number of places all of you go is the simplest path. Jackson from LA said, “I always take my girlfriend to do the same sort of stuff me and my wife did together. So, you’re in one section of a restaurant on a Wednesday night and a different section on a Thursday night. I had to see Dumb and Dumber twice. I saw all these different movies twice because I had to see the same thing with my wife and my girlfriend. Which is like a bad movie plot by itself. You don’t know how much acting I had to do when I went to a bad movie for the second time, and I had to laugh at a dumb joke I’d already seen but had to make it seem like I didn’t know the laugh was coming. It was a lot.”
The Last Days of the Incas by Kim MacQuarrie - Engaging history of the Spanish conquest of the Incan empire (modern-day Peru, plus parts of Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia) in the 1500s. Had never learned about this chapter in history, so was very helpful to have it laid out clearly in a very readable book.
The Spanish conquered the Incan empire shortly after decimating the Aztecs in modern day Mexico and pretty much used the same playbook, which I wrote about last year:
In short, Cortes and his men land on Mexico and proceed to conquer the mighty Aztec empire, despite being outnumbered thousand to one at some point. He was able to do this through superior technology (horses, which didn’t exist in the new world, and guns), political cunning (forming alliances with other peoples in the region) and factors beyond his control (largely smallpox, which killed 90% of the native people in the region).
In both cases, the Spanish were after riches, and in both cases, the group being invaded thought if they provided enough gold and treasure, the Spanish would be scared or satisfied. Obviously, this didn’t happen - there’s a saying in Spanish to the effect of “he who has, wants.”
The Incans were interesting to read about. They were an ethnic group in the tens of thousands that ruled over 10 million people in South America. They actually didn’t have a formal written language, but did this all with quipu, knotted strings which served as 16th-century mainframes and hard drives. Overall recommended.