Famous Dead People Who Are Still Causing Problems Today

It's no secret that the world is in pretty dire straits. Every day, headlines are filled with news of more conflict, from outright war to people despising each other just because they happen to have a different skin color, set of religious beliefs, or tolerance for conspiracy theories. People are weird creatures who will find any reason they can to hate each other, and maybe? Maybe we were just all doomed from the moment those early life forms crawled out of the ocean, looked around, and thought, "This looks alright, then."

Don't agree that happened? That's one of the things we're going to talk about. Most of the ideas, concepts, and beliefs that cause nothing but division in the modern world can be traced back to being created, or at least heavily influenced, by someone who may (or may not) have had any idea what they were unleashing on the world. They may not be around to see what their work has done to the world today, but at least we can talk about them and know who to curse.

Every Gen-Xer heard it at some point, in some context: "Just Say No." When former first lady Nancy Reagan died in 2016 at age 94, her obituary in The New York Times talked about her coining of the phrase, and using it in her campaign against drug and alcohol abuse. And it was certainly a full-steam campaign. Unfortunately, that's about the best thing that can be said about it.

In the years since, the campaign has been lambasted as oversimplifying the problem of substance abuse and addiction.

One of the first things that happened was addiction was turned into something widely interpreted as a moral failure, and those needing help were villainized. The Guardian notes that instead of giving people the information and the facts needed to make educated decisions, a massive problem — and industry — was boiled down into a deceptively simple concept: Just say no, or else you're a moral failure, and your addiction is all your fault.

By 2021, CNBC reported that more than a trillion dollars had been spent in the war on drugs, and enforcing policies that grew out of the "Just Say No" campaign. Those were things like zero-tolerance policies, "stop and frisk," and drug-sniffing dogs in schools. The mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders meant one in five people behind bars were there for drugs, something that hasn't improved the problem whatsoever. Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution told CNBC, "We are still in the midst of the most devastating drug epidemic in U.S. history."

If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

According to Smithsonian Magazine, when Marie Curie first headed to the U.S. back in 1921, she was lauded for her contributions to the scientific community. By that time, she had already discovered both polonium and radium, which would kick-start the race to develop the atomic bomb.

Curie did a lot of good with her discoveries, too: According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, she spent World War I heading up the Red Cross Radiology Service, using X-ray technology to treat wounded soldiers. Not too long afterward, she died.

Curie was relatively young at the time of her death in 1934, just 67 when she passed away due to what's believed to have been either leukemia or anemia. Her death followed a long bout of chronic illness, which The New York Times says was the result of her decades of work around radiation. She died never having acknowledged the connection between radioactivity and sickness, and didn't live to see the 1939 launch of advisory committees put together to appeal for grants in the research of atomic weapons.

In 2022, The Guardian reported that experts were warning that for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the number of nuclear weapons was on the rise. While it goes without saying that countries like the U.S. and Russia were going to "Dr. Strangelove" their way through the decades, other countries — like France and the U.K. — were gearing up, too.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was a psychiatrist who most famously created the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She did a ton of work revolutionizing the way Western society both cares for those near death, and talks about death. But some of her work has been misinterpreted, and that's a bad thing.

Kübler-Ross died in 2004. According to The New York Times, she suffered a series of strokes throughout the 1990s, and in 1997, she wrote in her autobiography, "I always say that death can be one of the greatest experiences ever. If you live each day of your life right, then you have nothing to fear."

Here's where Kübler-Ross' work is hurting those living through loss. McGill says that she developed her five stages of grief after interviewing scores of people who were diagnosed with a terminal illness. It was never meant to be applied to people mourning the death of a loved one, yet it is — all of the time.

Studies that have tried to apply the five stages of grief to mourning found that it doesn't work for everyone. In fact, McGill noted that a 2002 study found that only about 11% of people can expect to experience grief in the way Kübler-Ross wrote about it. Numerous psychologists and psychiatrists interviewed by the BBC condemn the continued use of the Kübler-Ross model for a simple reason: When people don't find their grief lining up with the model, it can cause even more distress.

Henry Ford died in 1947, and when it comes to his legacy, there's not enough paper in the world to record just how many ways he's still causing trouble today. So, let's hit the high points.

History says that yes, Ford changed the way American manufacturing did business, but Henry Ford also had a dark side. He was a raging anti-Semite and racist, and not everything he put in place was a good thing. In addition to continuing to legitimize things like segregation, persecution of Jewish people, and a refusal to promote minorities, he — and his private police force — also went a long way in destroying workers' unions. Oh — and he helped destroy the possibility of the U.S. building an environment-saving public transit system.

Before Ford got his hands on the transportation industry, the CATO Institute says that every American city with a population above 15,000 had electric streetcar service. Bigger cities had commuter trains, personal transit systems, and subways. That ended with Ford for a few reasons, starting with his lobbying for more public roads, and more people buying his cars.

In addition, his infamous assembly line changed the way cities were set up. Where they were once built around a central commercial and industrial hub with residential areas on the outside — perfect for the so-called "hub-and-spoke" system of mass transit — industries adopting the assembly line needed more room. These factories moved outside of the city centers, and created odd urban layouts that weren't easy for public transit systems to accommodate. Mass public transit in America was no more.

Scientific racism, says Smithsonian Magazine, is the oft-debunked yet horribly resilient theory that there is a biological basis for the inferiority and superiority of different races. It's the driving force behind things like eugenics and the Holocaust, and other, sneakier forms of discrimination that have remained in place well into the 21st century.

While people have been using the differences they see in each other as a reason to hate for a good long time, Sapiens says that when that hate became scientific, it became a whole other thing. And who's to blame for that? Carl Linnaeus.

That name should sound familiar from basic science classes: He's the one that developed the scientific system of taxonomy for classifying the biological world. It's why we group things into species, genus, family, and so on. Among the organisms that Linnaeus classified were people, and he did so in what would prove to be a very dangerous way.

Per Sapiens, Linnaeus wrote: Europeans (Homo europaeus) were light-skinned and light-haired (and were "light, wise, inventor[s]"), Americans (Homo americanus) had dark hair and dark eyes (and were "unyielding, cheerful, and free"), Asians (Homo asiaticus) were dark-eyed (and "stern, haughty, greedy"), and those from Africa (Homo africanus) had dark hair with braids (and were "sly, sluggish, neglectful"). Linnaeus' descriptions of physical characteristics and personalities laid the groundwork for the false belief that some races were better than others. That led to a heck of a lot of terrible events for centuries after his 1778 death.

Adolf Hitler may have died in 1945, but his deeply racist ideas have been picked up by countless neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups who continue to spread the hate. While the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum stresses that these groups aren't Hitler and the U.S. isn't the Germany of the Third Reich, Hitler-inspired hate groups are still out there.

There are scores of them, so let's talk about just a few. In 2022, GBH of Boston took a look at a local group called the Nationalist Social Club – 131. Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism, defined them as "a small neo-Nazi group ... [who] view themselves as soldiers, essentially, who are at war with the Jewish-controlled system that is plotting the extinction of the white race."

Among their targets? Drag shows, Black Lives Matter signs, and college girls who date anyone not of their own race and ethnicity.

According to The Guardian, neo-Nazi extremists are more widespread than they might seem at first glance. They reported on far-right rallies (like Unite the Right), and people like Christopher Hasson. He was arrested in 2019 in connection with firearms and drugs, and it was only after his arrest that it was discovered he not only had neo-Nazi ties, but that he was trying to work out how he could possibly kill "almost every last person on Earth."

Hitler may be dead, but the voices of those following in his footsteps are getting louder.