"Puny Gods"

For centuries, millennia even, people have evolved drastically. Mostly into dickheads.

There is of course no evidence of any biological evolution of us homo-sapiens from when we were hacking away at people from neighbouring villages for food or riches or territory or control of resources, or constructing drainage systems in the Indus Valley, or palaces and fabulous gardens in Mesopotamia (Iraq-ish), or the pyramids in Egypt and Peru and Mexico, or the pagodas in the far east, or the intricate Hindu temples hewn out of solid rock, or the majestic cathedrals and fortified castles in Europe, to the day we travelled to and landed on the moon some 384,400 kilometres away, or on a lower scale, split an atom to unleash unimaginable energy and thereby, deadly force.

Strangely enough, forcing two atoms together does the same thing. I'm digressing now. Hate that about me. Grrr...

We've conquered and colonised the third rock from the sun. "A mote of dust caught in a sunbeam", as Carl Sagan put it.

Or so we thought. Some idiots still do.

Where we weren't able to establish control, nature and the cosmos always reserved its right of reminding us that it was around before us, and will continue to be there long after we are gone.

We tamed fire, but California burns. We tamed rivers, but the Indian monsoons render half of Bangladesh under water every year. We built better and stronger houses, and yet earthquakes in the Himalayan/Hindukush footprint turn them into rubble in the blink of an eye. We mastered the oceans with our naval armadas, our sophisticated submarines carrying enough ordnance to fossilise us all, and revelled in the gorgeous coastal resorts we built, and yet a tsunami, or whirlpools of winds we lovingly call Brenda or Dorothy, lasting no longer than a 4-minute pop video, wash them away like discarded post-BBQ toothpicks on my decking trying to resist a jet-wash. As the Hulk would say, "Puny God". That'd be us.

Physically and biologically we are still driven by the same basic instincts that enabled our ancestors to survive and prosper, exerting unrivalled dominion over everything around us.

We hit the top of the food chain long, long before any history or mythology was ever recorded. A built-in arrogance comes with that as standard.

Today, we don't battle nature as much as we battle each other. Our arrogance has led us to interpret nature's fury as a result of anthropological actions. Hence we level our pitchforks where we can draw blood. The Green Joke, I call it. Since we can't beat nature, we beat each other. The fact is, nothing we posses, despite our god-like prowess, can fight climate change - a single volcanic eruption lasting a week will dwarf and negate an entire city's use of special light-bulbs and a jute tote bag (flown over from Dhaka, accruing more air miles than four jaunts to Spain), no one ever uses more than twice. It'd be funny if it wasn't true.

The only areas where we have repeatedly given nature a good and proper bashing is pollution and waste: Plastic waste in oceans and the deliberate decimation of the world's forests and biodiversity. We waste 40% of all food we till the land for, hire trucks, trains, ferries, and planes for - just for looking a bit wonky. The rest of the 60% we carry home in our Made-In-Bangladesh bags for life, eventually chucking half of it away three days later because it was on offer and we bought too much.

I suspect nature will find a way to fight back. In the words of the famous philosopher of our times, Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, "Life, will find a way". Life always does. It's kind of like the overuse of antibiotics renders them useless because the bacteria evolve into more powerful strains within a few months, if not weeks. Thing is, they're only adapting to survive, just like we are. Don't hold it against the little critters.

Anyway...

Back to the point I was making about our evolution: We did evolve, in a way. Indeed, our larger brains gave us superiority over all things that moved or breathed, but we simply went mental with it: We got arrogant. We went tribal. We developed ideas. We made rules. A lot of them were based on our survival instinct centred on commonality (racism, anyone?), teamwork, empathy and cooperation for survival. All of which, including altruism, are biological instincts. We've managed to fuck up each one. Different story, another time, perhaps.

And thus began every single 'ism', initially as a fairly benign set of moral postulates. We developed religions, Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism, Catholicism, Islamism, etc, each one claiming to be the right way and the only way to please a god no one had spoken to or a path to a heaven no one had ever seen. We went full cerebral.

If that wasn't enough, in seeking to codify the human condition, we developed political systems supplicating one for another, often with extreme violence - socialism for feudalism and communism for fascism, each new idea eventually morphing into the very thing it sought to replace, forgetting in the process that, nature always wins. You can't control people just like you can't control nature. Build the Matrix as many times as you want, but there always be the problem of choice. Right or wrong in your manufactured mindset, there will always be a Morpheus. There will always be a Neo. There will always be a Zion.

Like I said before, we've gone completely mental.