Eight Billion People Didn’t Start a War Yesterday
Some unsupervised Sunday thoughts about humanity, nuclear weapons, aliens and a man called Dave.
It started, as these things often do, with me making the mistake of looking at the news.
I rarely bother anymore. I gave it up because I simply refuse to allow that insidious drip-feed of gloom to be delivered into my mind each day.
But yesterday I opened a browser window and there it was. One of those click-baity news headlines they stick in front of you when you just want to Google something.
I didn’t click on it. I can’t even remember exactly what it said. But what lodged in my brain was something along the lines of: some former American government figure thinks the US should consider bombing Chinese infrastructure.
I may be doing the headline an injustice. But that was what arrived in my head. And somehow, that one headline triggered a much bigger question:
What the f**k is wrong with us?
Not just the people in charge.
Us.
Humans in general.
— —
I Want to Be in Charge of Seventy Million People
Human beings are mostly all right. But I’m increasingly suspicious that we’ve designed our civilisation so the most questionable ones get the microphone.
Imagine someone at your local pub announcing:
“I’ve decided that I should be responsible for the lives of 70 million people.”
You’d probably move your chair.
Yet in politics, they say: “Excellent. Have you considered standing for Parliament?”
Most reasonable people don’t wake up thinking: “You know what would really improve my Tuesday? Authority over an entire nation.”
I Especially don’t know what deep psychological condition, if any, you need to possess before casually suggesting that somebody consider bombing another country’s industrial infrastructure. But it does make me wonder why people capable of discussing such mass destruction with the emotional investment I’d normally reserve for choosing a sandwich, seem disproportionately attracted to positions of power.
I’m sure there are perfectly normal politicians too. Presumably some slipped through the net. But perhaps the people who desperately want enormous power, are precisely the people we shouldn’t be giving it to.
Imagine explaining our system to an alien.
ALIEN: “How do you select the individuals who run your country and control weapons capable of destroying your civilisation?”
HUMAN: “We hold a popularity contest.”
ALIEN: “Among your wisest citizens?”
HUMAN: “Good God, no.”
ALIEN: “Your most emotionally balanced?”
HUMAN: “Err… Not necessarily.”
ALIEN: “Then who?”
HUMAN: “Mostly people who really, really want the job.”
ALIEN: “Ah… I think we’ve identified the problem.”
I suspect this is why aliens haven’t contacted us.
Then We Invented Nuclear Weapons
This may represent the absolute pinnacle of human ingenuity and stupidity occurring simultaneously.
We discovered how to split the atom.
Brilliant.
What shall we do with that?
“Well, hear me out…”
Our alien is going to need another briefing.
ALIEN: “You have weapons capable of destroying entire cities?”
HUMAN: “Yes.”
ALIEN: “Why?”
HUMAN: “To stop the other humans using theirs.”
ALIEN: “Why do they have them?”
HUMAN: “To stop us using ours.”
ALIEN: “Why don’t you both get rid of them?”
HUMAN: “Because they might not.”
ALIEN: “Does anybody actually want to use them?”
HUMAN: “Hopefully not.”
ALIEN: “So everyone keeps weapons nobody wants to use because everyone is frightened somebody else might use the weapons nobody wants to use?”
HUMAN: “Exactly.”
ALIEN: “And you consider yourselves intelligent?”
HUMAN: “Have you met the dolphins?”
And the really ridiculous thing?
Somewhere along the way, we stopped calling this completely f**king insane and started calling it ‘strategic stability’. In government buildings across the globe, there are probably 500-page documents explaining why all of this is a perfectly sensible idea.
And this is the system working properly.
Except…
By this point in my Sunday morning philosophical ponderings, I’d assembled a fairly convincing case that humanity is completely bonkers.
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There’s just one problem.
Most humans aren’t like this.
Drop your shopping in a car park and somebody will probably hurry over to help you pick it up. Collapse in a restaurant and strangers will try to save your life.
Lose your dog and people you’ve never met may spend their afternoon looking for it.
People donate blood to strangers they’ll never meet.
It just doesn’t make the news.
BREAKING: Dave Has Behaved Himself Again
Imagine tonight’s bulletin.
“Good evening. Our main story: approximately eight billion people did not start a war today.”
Cut to Wolverhampton, UK.
“We can confirm that at approximately 7:43 this morning, Dave noticed his neighbour had accidentally left her recycling box in the road and moved it back onto the pavement.”
Reporter outside Dave’s house.
“Authorities say the situation remains friendly.”
Back to the studio.
“In international news, France has once again declined to invade Belgium.”
“And in Swindon, a man allowed another motorist to pull out of a junction without questioning his parentage.”
Nobody would watch.
Eight billion people mostly got on with their lives yesterday. Then two people punched each other and somebody uploaded the video.
Guess which version of humanity gets delivered to your screen.
Maybe We’ve Been Looking in the Wrong Place
Maybe humanity isn’t the problem. Maybe we’re just giving far too much attention to its worst representatives. Because ordinary human life isn’t mostly war. Mostly, we’re just getting on with living.
Making lunch. Going to work. Looking after loved ones. Fixing things. Reading, playing cards, planting tomatoes, making babies.
None of this gets into the history books.
Our alien might eventually notice this too.
ALIEN: “Why have all those humans stopped?”
HUMAN: “Someone crashed their car.”
ALIEN: “Do they know them?”
HUMAN: “No.”
ALIEN: “Then why are they running towards it?”
HUMAN: “Because someone might need help.”
ALIEN: “But they were all going somewhere. Now they’re being inconvenienced.”
HUMAN: “Yes.”
ALIEN: “And they’re helping a complete stranger?”
HUMAN: “That’s what we do.”
ALIEN: “These are the same species?”
HUMAN: “Yes.”
ALIEN: “The ones with the nuclear weapons?”
HUMAN: “Unfortunately.”
ALIEN: “Your species makes absolutely no sense.”
HUMAN: “You have no idea.”
So maybe when I ask what’s wrong with humanity, I’m starting from a very distorted view of it.
I look at the news and think I’m looking at the world.
I’m not.
I’m looking at a tiny collection of the most violent, frightening, outrageous and generally screwed-up things that happened in the world, carefully gathered together and presented to me as if this is what humanity did today.
It isn’t.
Humanity also drove past each other at seventy miles an hour separated by a painted white line. We handed our children to strangers at school. We ate food grown by people we’ll never meet. We got into aeroplanes flown by complete strangers and went to sleep.
We helped people who fell over. We fed animals. We made each other laugh. We sat beside people who didn’t want to be alone.
Billions of tiny acts of trust, cooperation and kindness happened today. And almost none of them were newsworthy.
That’s the distortion.
If you judge humanity by the news, you’re judging eight billion people by the tiny handful who did something sufficiently awful to get on television.
Maybe Dave in Wolverhampton, quietly moving his neighbour’s recycling box out of the road, is a far better representation of humanity than the nutters with microphones threatening to blow each other up.
Dave just doesn’t get much airtime.
So I think my Sunday morning question was not the right one.
Maybe there isn’t quite as much wrong with us as I thought.
Maybe we’ve just been paying attention to the wrong people.
Because eight billion people didn’t start a war yesterday.
But apparently that isn’t news.
