This article is one if the best epitomes of the lamp post fallacy I have ever seen.

You've heard the tale:

A drunk man is looking for his keys beneath a lamp post. A passer-by tries to help, and asks “where did you last see them?”

The man waves across to a dark field. “Overr there somewhere.”

“Then why are you looking here?”

“Because,” the searching man says, “this is where the light is.”

— — —

The author argues, based on pop culture from various eras, that baldness is a conspiracy of global management and chemical poisoning. Men like George Washington (who lived his life on country estates with ceramic plumbing and non plumbing) went bald due to mercury and lead poisoning. Baldness only clusters where modernity rules. Hollywood and Gilette are conspiring to normalize this abnormal condition, cutting one’s hair stimulates baldness, hair picks up radiation and is an antenna…all because many ancient heroes are described as being gloriously pated.

Nope.

Long flowing hair in m n is in ancient stories because it was a sign of divine possession, in turn because this was the unusual look that the sun gods had. Heecules, Samson, Moses, Elijah, etc. were all described in such a way as to identify them with the sun, wither because they were originally gods or were in league with the god of the sun. This motif recurs throughout world mythology.

And so does baldness, all through ancient art and sculpture, wven in civilizations where heavy metals were not much used.

And why do men shave their faces bald these days? It ain't because of social engineering, but because of World War 1. Chemical warfare (mustard gas) meant that every man in the teenches needed a gas mask.

Gas masks don't work well with beards, so soldiers were, for the first time in modern history, required to shave. Before then, bald faces were a non-universal upper class signifier. After, men who had grown accustomed to a daily shave came home to a recently placue-ravaged and hygeine-obsrssed culture, where they were a great target market for Gilette and others looking to capture them as customers.

This stuff is not mysterious, it's just not a sexy conspiracy. Knowledge of history os a great insulator from much idiocy, whether that propounded from on high by political and cultural authorities, or from below by hucksters. This is why I write about history so often on my ‘stack.