Hooked

Submitted by Lindsay
Melbourne Australia!

Farewell, Love, and all thy laws forever
Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more
 - Thomas Wyatt, 1557

(11/2018) If there is one thing the human race cannot help being, it is being human. It is impossible for us to be any different to what and who we are, which is obvious and trite until you think abut it. We pride ourselves on being able to grow, to be different, to meet our needs and rise to any challenge, but that is only true in a limited sense. We are a species, and for all our diversity we remain 99% genetically similar – but oh boy do we fight about that 1%

When we had to battle to survive by hunting and gathering, we learnt our lessons the hard way. As soon as we’d done that we needed to be victorious over our environment and our enemies. We got a kick out of such success and wanted to overcome everything we could find, and when that had been done we invented more. Today our quests are not about survival, but about understanding the fundamentals of life, the universe and everything.

This insatiable desire to improve, to strive and overcome is how we’re made, the will to live more highly developed in us than in any other living thing. We will not be some other animal’s food, bow our heads in meek surrender; we fight back, we seek to dominate. We create enemies when no other convenient ones are around, and beat our chests when we win. We don’t do humble, we rejoice. We are justly proud and boastful of our prowess, and therein lies our weakness.

These adventure and challenges are ways of testing ourselves, and we quickly learn to anticipate that little zing of dopamine we get as reward. No one, not babies, children or adults can resist it. We take extraordinary risks for it, we strive for first, and all of us find ways of maximizing it. Addictions can hook us, and the price – yes, there is always a price – is, at a minimum, the loss of concentration, of awareness of our surroundings. We become fixated, and even though we are still able to do many things at once, the future is given less consideration. The now is all, the payoff a quick twitch of the brain cells. When we are stymied by not succeeding, we know that next time we will, and on we go.

Most of us keep a firm hold on reality and suffer no great harm, but some of us need more and harder challenges for gratification. Discovery, conquest of the unknown, learning to understand things no one else has are - all these, while wonderful parts of our makeup, can engulf us. And have –for some I phones are now more necessary than sleep and exercise.

For all our ingenuity and brilliance, we are never able to see the long term outcomes of our inventions or discoveries. We do not have foresight, no matter how we like to think we do. Many of our developments bring advantage to whole populations and to future generations, but even these have unforeseeable consequences. In whatever way the wheel came to be developed, and for all the incredible things it led to, it proved very useful in conquering; spears have gone from a possible kill to remote drones bringing unobserved slaughter; the washboard morphed into the waterboard and so on. Far more has come from my first interest, chemistry. It has produced some miracles leading to major turning points in modern civilisation. Many we cannot do without even when they are killing us. Addictive drugs, high efficiency guns and the dark web are there because people want their rush.

The problem is, how do we willingly give up our comforts? Can we banish air conditioners, plastic pollution, Carbon Dioxide excesses, ozone holes, fossil fuel addiction, unbreathable air, fishless seas (yes, we’re getting there), drowned islands, receding coastlines, once-in-a-hundred-year storms every year, forced animal migrations… the list goes on.

All this and social conditions that are often far from the comfort zone, a melting pot of political upheaval, the rise of tyrannical power to keep us aghast. Trade wars that will be more devastating than all the other kind. All these are growing forces as we go on our unswerving ways, all too aware of the problems yet unable to even start to fix them.

"Science will save us!" No, not this time, the damage to the environment has gone way beyond that possibility. Well, the political system is still robust - democracy is the answer. No again, it is the problem. Democracy does not allow leaders to impose unpalatable policies on the electorate and stay in office. But surely technology is growing so quickly. New computing power will come up with the solution. Ah, wishful thinking. This is not anything you can compute. Well, If we’d had a benevolent dictator in charge of the world who was also a genius the cycle may have been broken in time, and it would be still be business as usual. Unfortunately that didn’t and will not happen.

The real problem is that we have set in motion a wizard’s apprentice that will keep on doing the thing we cannot live with. This time there are no magic spells or wands to wave, and blaming others – God, China, Russia, communism, ungodly ways and so on – are just pie-in-the-sky rose coloured glasses. The truth is we, all of us, are to blame. Our ways of life, our very nature has led us to this end time.

We live in the age of denial, when the future s both obvious and inevitable.

And it is NOT OUR FAULT. It’s our nature. All of us want the rush, and this is the price. The future might be fear and terror, but we can be afraid and terrified together. Except for the very few who have somehow evolved to carry on.

Welcome to the brave new world.