Four words that could have saved the world.....

What If I’m Wrong?

I write this as a bit of a belated curiosity or postscript to the human race and what could have been if every human being had had this idea drummed into them at an early age until it became an instant habit of thought.

I’m afraid this information is a little bit late, much too late to save Earth and the human race which seems to have piled error upon atrocity for thousands upon thousands of years until we the present occupants of this planet find ourselves no wiser than we did at the start. Sure we have mobile phones and air-conditioning but along with that we have an Earth which we have conspicuously stripped of much of its bio-diversity, as long as a list of human sins and horrors which no imagined hell beyond could equal. 

The Human race seems to have made the Earth its own private hell. Whether through the annals of the Romans, of the inquisition, of Communism or of depleted uranium and white phosphorous used on Iraqi children. Combine this with what I consider a likely extinction level event unfolding in Fukushima and we have an inevitable picture that humanity’s best days are behind it. 

But what if people had done things different? What if Hitler had been instilled with the habit: “What if I’m wrong?” He didn’t have to believe he was wrong, but at least the possibility of entertaining a doubt would certainly have possibly saved the world a great deal of trouble..

What if Tony Blair too had thought ‘what if I’m wrong?’ we would have been spared the Iraq war, deformed nuclear mutant babies and the growth of ISIS.

What if ISIS themselves had the thought ‘what if I’m wrong?’ mind controlled into them by some benign brain washing expert. What if we all had this idea ‘What if I’m wrong?’

But the funny thing is, for whatever reason of human psychology, this is the thought we all seem to experience least. 

Is it because something about animal nature is not about reflection but pure will and action?

Obviously if a cat catching a bird where to handicap itself by asking ‘what if I’m wrong’ about this jump to catch that bird, he would likely starve in due course, but then cats haven’t been given the same kind of leading role in directing the fate and future of a whole planet and all its inhabitants.

What if the Japanese government of the post war had just held back a moment before decided to allow the Americans to build nuclear power plants along the coastline of a highly geologically unstable island?

What if they had asked ‘What if we’re wrong about this?’. The answer of course we now know, if you’re wrong then you will likely poison the whole Pacific ocean wiping out the largest biological domain on planet Earth, it’s primary source of oxygen and possibly destroying Earth itself as a life sustaining environment at some point in the future. This answer would probably have given them pause for thought and they would wisely have decided not to be such bloody muppets.

But they didn’t. And humans never do. They never stop for a moment and ask themselves whether they might be wrong and about to commit a major fuck up.

And this in essence, is the tragedy of the rather short story of the human race.

I wonder if the cats will make a better job of it.

As a writer I used to have this great hope that my small ideas and projects would one day come to fruition and be printed and bound and would form part of the great depository of human knowledge and human experience. Now I no longer see any future for humanity, there will be no books or anything in the future since books and knowledge require that the primary need of basic human survival are mastered and the way things are on Earth I rather fear that very soon the human race will be reduced to that condition of day to day survival in a toxic deadly environment where no food will grow and the fish will all be dead or radioactive.

But I could be wrong.